So having climbed West Hill to take the other images, as the sun was almost over the horizon, I ran back down, climbed in car and drove over to East Hill, climbed that and shot from this viewpoint!
I felt that the sun angle on the Castle walls would be better from this hill and so justified the effort to myself.
Just a 0.45 ND grad on this, but used swing and tilt to hold focus together
you'ce captured some lovely colours here, but the lower 1/3 is a bit muted. How about making this a panroramic and cropping? You'd lose the foreground in the bottom left corner but I still feel it makes for a better image.
The danger, I think, in losing the foreground is that the big dip in the ground which emphasises Corfe Castle's location could be lost.
Great shot. Are the fields covered in frost? It looks intensely cold which adds to the picture. Sunsets on old castles at this time of year seem to be particularly good.
Thanks for the comments. I have two more sheets of this one to process, when the sun gets more intense. I might give one of them a slight push, but haven't decided yet.
I don't think the crop would help Mark. We should expect muted colours on days like this and agree with Pentaxuser that the sense of height would be diminished. I expended lots of effort to get up there!
There was frost on everything, body parts included! On the original this is very apparent on the light foreground bottom left containing frozen bramble, thistles and gorse. It was -4 deg C at the bottom and there was a cold breeze as well up the other hill.
It just goes to show, beauty is in the eye of the beholder! I tried a little crop on the jpeg here, and it works for me, with a very strong diagonal filling the frame. All I need now is to get down to Corfe and hope the weather's OK!
Baxter, you know the most awesome places!!! This is my favorite of the three images, mostly because I am drawn to the warm color on the hill and castle walls. The morning looks cold, but this image makes me want to be there. I love it. Great to see you posting more stuff.
Sometimes the extreme effort to capture a beautiful scene does not work and it seems the effort is wasted but this time you got it perfectly, congratulations. It couldn't have been easy. Just beautiful. Particulary for a girl in mid America without a castle to shoot.