Boothsmere Knutsford

Boothsmere in Knutsford (53° 18.180', -2° 20.943') is a relatively small shallow weedy mere set in the grounds of Booths Hall. My in-laws live just round the corner and about a year ago they took the whole family on a nice walk past the mere. I made a mental note that it would be good to try and do a winter sunrise shoot there at some stage. With this vaguely in mind I packed a very basic camera kit including a tripod when we went to visit at Christmas. 

Boothsmere Knutsford

The few days we were visiting the weather was rather mixed. Half the country was flooded and the other half was being battered by storm force gales, but on Boxing Day morning there was a little bit of a frost and the promise of a possible sunrise.
I grabbed my camera and was off. Unfortunately in packing light, or rather very light, I had failed to bring my ND graduated filters, I was going to have to make do with HDR. 

I'm not a big fan of HDR, but needs must.This first shot was 6 shots combined using TuFuse
What I like about TuFuse is that it give very natural HDR results it simply brings up the shadows and maintains the highlights, what more could you want?

Having just downloaded the latest version Max has included a batch file so in windows you can select the images you want to combine together and click - "send to" which a really great addition. Previously you had to open a command prompt and type in a simple text string listing all the images in turn, which was a little tedious. 

Dead tree

Once the sun was up I attempted a shot of the sun creating flare just behind a dead tree. This is just a single exposure with a little help in Lightroom and some minor perspective transformations in Photoshop. Ideally I would have been further way to help with perspective, but there wasn't sufficient room between the tree and the mere!

After a few more shots around the mere, I headed back home. 

Tangle of branches

Frosty

Resources:

www.marona.co.uk