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The empty acres

"This flight is sailing through the clouds

And the blue heavens

The homeland appears like a developing photograph

Through the mists as I return to land

I see Scotland of the high mountains

And the empty acres." (translated lyrics of Alba by Runrig)

 

Hard-edge ND grad filters are a bit tricky to use for shots like this where there's something in the foreground that creeps well above the horizon. I don't own any soft-edge grads so I'm not sure how much of an improvement using one here would've been.

 

I ended up manually blending three separate exposures using layer masks and the paintbrush and gradient tools in Photoshop.

 

One exposure was for the sky and most of the foreground with the 0.9 HE grad's edge placed along the horizon. One exposure was taken without any filter and was used only for the rock on the left. The third exposure was taken with my finger in the frame covering the sun and I used it to remove (most of the) flare. Or more accurately, I removed the flare I didn't like.

 

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Uploaded on July 27, 2014
Taken on July 5, 2014