"When bales bail" - King Sutton, Oxfordshire.

 Photographers out there who are dedicated to capturing great landscape photographs will know that driving around aimlessly, hoping to find a nice location before the sun goes down won't work. You must have found your location, composition and the angle of the sun on your subject before setting out on a shoot. You can't just drive around and hope to stumble on the perfect scene. I have done my fair share of this, before realising it is very stressful and un-rewarding. However, saying this, I found myself in this situation yesterday.

The previous afternoon I had attempted to take a shot of King Sutton, Oxfordshire from the top of a hill (standing on top of a hay bale - see photo).

Taken with Camera Phone

That afternoon I waited, like a true landscape photographer, for the sun to break through the clouds, bathing the scene in front of me with the warm, golden, late afternoon light. Of course I was also willing on the clouds to part and the sun to beam across the landscape. This didn't happen.

The sun never reached the foreground bales so the shot was a write-off instantly. I waited until after sunset, when the blue light of twilight contrasted with the artificial light of King Sutton church and this is the scene that presented itself.

Shutter-speed: 30secs
Aperture: f13
Iso: 200
0.6 graduated filter

I was fairly happy but I wanted the golden sunlight to side-light the trees and bales. I asked the farmer of the field how long the bales would be there for. He replied "oh....they'll be there for a while yet". The next day I went back only to find they had been removed and my chance had gone. Great. I had abandoned my chances for a steak in the pub for this and now I will go completely steak-less AND not get the shot. The light was becoming better and better as the sun neared the horizon. I had no location to shoot.

I then drove around King Sutton attempting to stumble across the perfect scene, preferably containing bales. I drove into this field on the other side of King Sutton and asked the farmer who was baling round bales if I could take some photographs on his field.

After shutting his door to the tractor I literally ran around the field trying to find a composition that would work before the sun merged into the grey skies on the western horizon. I found this track, made from a tractor, which acted as a great lead-in-line to the photograph.

As I say on my landscape workshops, "Remove the clutter, anything un-deserving in the picture, and "keep it simple, stupid". Leonardo Da Vinci coined the phrase "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" but I like the other one better!

Shutter-speed: 2secs

Aperture: f11

Iso: 50

0.9 graduated filter + Polariser.
Shot with red filter to convert blue sky into black when converted into black & white.

Simple lines, dramatic sky. Job done...just.

John