First Light

The rising sun peeps through the trees into the Wear valley, near Penshaw.

I'm not a great fan of these so called high dynamic range (HDR) shots, they often look very unnatural, but there is a fashion for them in some quarters and the photos do sell. As with most techniques of post processing, if it is not possible to tell that there has been trickery, that is when the results are most pleasing.

In fact photographers have been using HDR from the very earliest days of the art, when the very limited emulsions of the day could not record a realistic range of tones, and it was necessary to use more than one exposure to adequately record a scene. I believe that it was first employed to capture seascapes with detail in the dark water and light sky.

In this case I used two very different exposures, one to tame the sky and sun and another to reveal detail in the foreground, They were taken hand held and blended in Photoshop. I like to think that this is not too obvious in the result!