Derwent Water. Cumbria.

30th March 2007

As photographers, I guess we all hope for stunning sunsets and sunrises every day, sometimes we’re lucky and sometimes we feel we’re not.

This evening felt more like one of the unlucky occasions as the twilight approached with barely a hint of colour. The files were downloaded to my hard drive and languished there for a few weeks until I got round to looking at them properly in my raw converter. 

What I had not noticed in the tiny monitor on the camera was the subtly of the lighting and the gentle warm colours in the reflections.

I shoot almost exclusively on Raw files these days and expose to retain the maximum detail in the highlights and it is a shot like this that makes me very grateful that I do. Much of the atmosphere lies in the lighter tones values.

If the shot had been underexposed by even a small amount, the separation of the highlights would have been difficult to achieve under these conditions.