Sunlit uplands on the Blackdown Hills

Nearly a month ago, I went out on a dawn shoot on the Blackdown Hills in Somerset. My main intention was to capture the sun rising over the Isle valley beneath its eastern escarpment.

The shots I took there were nothing special but on the way, I noticed that the Otter valley on the other side of the ridge was filled with early morning mist. Rather than driving home again, therefore, I took a small detour and found a lane from which I was able to capture several stunning views of the sun rising over the mists. This was the stand-out shot that I uploaded to 500px.com:

In terms of post-processing, I made global adjustments in Lightroom, cloned out some distracting lens flare in Photoshop, applied lens corrections in Dfine 2 from the Google Nik Collection, then finished it off with a soft glow effect in Perfect Effects 8.5 from OnOne. Before doing any of this, though, I added keyword tags and a geo-tag in Lightroom, for the reasons I set out in my recent post for Ordnance Survey.

Very gratifyingly, thanks to hundreds of Likes and Favourites  – with lots of reciprocal appreciation of other photos on my part – it made it into the top 20 on 500px.com, with my highest ever final ranking of 99.4.