Somerset West and Taunton

Burrow Mump, Somerset Levels. A local landmark that I've visited a few times in different conditions when the weather looked to have been doing something unusual or interesting.

I had set out to capture this old ruined church at sunset. My plan was to stand way back and capture the mump from a distance with a magnificent red sky behind it. As things turned out there was a lack of significant cloud anywhere but to the east of the mump. This scene followed a pretty, but less than sensational sunset. I decided to wait around until the light dropped and the stars revealed themselves, as I have been wanting to test my (Bargain basement, £216 brand-new) Samyang 14mm 2.8 lens.

I have to say my first impressions are that this is a stellar lens for the money. Being super-wide, it has a great depth of field, as this single exposure, wide-open at 2.8 shows. I did add a little light to the foreground grass and side of the building with a handheld torch (I didnt take my usual speedlight), but the main illumination comes from some distant security lights in Burrowbridge. The grey on the front of the building is where these lights were obscured by trees

For anyone interested in the lens, it's cheap because it is purely manual - both for focus and aperture, yet with live view it is still possible to see and focus in very dim conditions. Set to 'AV' mode, the camera will still meter to give a 'default' exposure. Certainly a cheap way to enter astro photography and hard to beat for image quality at any price.

ISO 200! 30 Seconds f/2.8

One from a couple of weeks ago at Burrow Mump, looking west into the setting sun.

I had experimented with the in-camera HDR (High Dynamic Range) feature on my 5Diii and rather liked the results. Unfortunately, I had set my camera to shoot RAW and small jpgs, as I wanted to save some space on my hard drives, without doing away with jpegs completely.

As a result the in-camera processing combines the small jpegs into an equally small HDR jpeg. That wasn't much use to me, so processed this from a single RAW, lifting the shadows.

One odd quirk that I've noticed when using the in-camera HDR is that the exposure simulation on live view no longer works. I have no idea why.