*** This Week Through Your Eyes 2025.08.30 ***

It took me a second look at this picture to see the guy is floating in space.

Something different this time. Nice play of shadow and light.

I like these two the best in this set. Reminds me that it will soon be Blueberry time in the Apennines.

Whitbarrow

Last weekend we took some friends for a walk up onto Whitbarrow Scar. This is a huge whale-back of limestone that rises along the skyline we look out at from home.
The lower slopes are thickly wooded, though still deeply weathered into typical limestone pavements. It feels a little odd to have to pick your way carefully over the ankle breaking grikes while surrounded by woodland. Tiny streams also appear from nowhere (and disappear too).

Emerging onto the summit you encounter a different world - windswept ridges of bare rock and scattered stunted trees.

Many of the ash trees are suffering badly with ash dieback, probably made more vulnerable by the harsh growing conditions and lack of water.

A haunting landscape.

These are gorgeous, especially the light in the last. Good to see you back with the birds!

These type of bridges are so elegant. The doorway to the pieve looks interesting with the two-tiered column effect.

This is a really fine shot. Yes, the backlit grasses are wonderful, but so are the little details like the bit of fence on the left, and the trees with their shadows in the mid ground. I prefer this to the 'ray of light' one.

Gorgeous. And a wonderful memento. What is it made of? Ceramic?

Sometimes our ornaments in our homes have a backstory that makes the extra precious.

I brought some things home from my late mothers home that have no value, but remind me of my childhood.

This looks like a landscape full of photographic possibilities. These are my favourites. I love these wild sort of landscapes.

Maybe a return visit on a sunny day to bring out the shadows.

I rather like this one.

Partial colour ? suits well here with this dot on right.

Thanks!
I agree that portrait crop works better in this case, thanks for suggestion.

Interesting scene, with such light patches it almost looks like there is canopy high above.

This photo has interesting light going on left side.
Bridge is nice, sleek looking.

I like these 2 shots but the area around sun is distracting. If there is anything I’d like to improve in modern cameras then it’s highlight protection, in lights, sun etc.

Return visit definitely on the agenda - but without the accompanying friends 😉

Interesting landscape, at some places look like walls built by ancient civilizations. And these trees, they could provide multitude of photo possibilities.

Modern cameras are pretty good in that regard, but whenever you're pointing directly at the sun it's a bit of a challenge if you want to pull back details and colour from the shadows without blowing out the sky around the sun whatever camera you have. Film did appear to roll off in a more natural manner, but the shadows would have gone completely in scenarios such as this, so we are a lot more fortunate with what our cameras can do today.

In situations like this I do tend to bracket, but the Z8 has one inexplicable flaw when bracketing, it doesn't offer a -ve only mode (e.g. 0,-1,-2), there's only balanced bracketing (e.g. -2,-1,0,+1,+2), which makes it a faff to bracket handheld, unless you're prepared to seriously underexpose, in which case much of the viewfinder here would have been black. This is really stupid omission in what would have otherwise been a near perfect camera. Every other mirrorless camera I own has separate -ve, balanced and +ve modes, including the much maligned Z7 that preceded it.

Anyway, in the case of the first one of those images, I did take a bracketed shot that was -2EV darker than the shot I used originally, so the highlights in that one can be brought back...

Note that these aren't actually blown out on the left, but the red channel is right on the limit over the sun (about 254 if I hover over it in C1). However, you'll notice there's an unexpected colour shift on the cliff wall, it's lost a lot of its magenta tones. I'm not sure why as I've matched the white balance setting in both shots, unless there was a bit of lens flare going on that's changed between the two images due the handheld camera moving slightly, although I suspect it's more a result of noise reduction kicking in with the limited number of bits above the noise floor captured in those shadows.

Another point of note is that I can't entirely stop the sky looking blown out without it looking a bit odd. Dropping the highlights over the sun area using an elliptical mask, leads to the surrounding sky looking a bit darker than it should as the mask rolls off, giving a bit of a dark shadow around it. I might have been able to get this looking a bit better with more tweaking of the gradient, but this is about as good as I've managed to get it after a quick play around this evening.

I've also attached a side by side of both images with the before / after of the edit to show just how dark those shadows got when exposing for the sun.