Dramatic Late Afternoon Light

Late Afternoon Light on the Crofts at Duirinish (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L lens at 98mm, ISO 400, 1/30 sec at f/18, Handheld)

On my way home this afternoon, after helping release some of our new red squirrels, I stopped at Duirinish to capture the dramatic light on the croft land there.  The above shot is one of my favourite views which I have taken several times but the light today was just perfect, highlighting the low angled shadows and fence posts.  The whole view was rendered special though by the snow on Sgurr Coinneach in the background and the light refleced on the clouds, juxtaposed against the bright blue sky.

As the sun fell lower, and disappeared behind some clouds I was able to take the following shot looking towards Drumbuie with the Cuillins in the background.  This was still very bright, looking directly into the sun, so I used the auto-bracket function and merged the three shots using Lightroom's HDR tool to try and retain some of the foreground detail without blowing out the sky.

Late Sunlit Sky above Drumbuie and the Cuillins from Duirinish (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L lens at 70mm, ISO 800, 1/500 sec at f/18, Handheld, HDR +/- 1 stop)

Finally, I have tried without much success to photograph Highland cattle.  They do pose the difficulty of moving a fair bit so a fast shutter speed is required.  Match that with my desire to try and get enough depth of field to retain the detail in the head but have a blurred background it is a delicate balancing act.  I don't much like the colour version of this one so opted for black & white, and then used various tools in Lightroom to darken down the background a bit and empahsise the cow's head.  It was pretty poor light by this time so I had to up the ISO to my cakera's maximum of 6400 so the image was a bit grainy.  I reduced this using Nik Collection's Define programme which made the final image not too bad.

Highland Cow (Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L lens at 85mm, ISO 6400, 1/500 sec at f/5.6, Handheld)