I've been wanting to try some dawn shots of the Long Man of Wilmington for a long time and last night I made the decision to get up extra early and head along the A27 to capture some photographs.

The Long Man of Wilmington is a landmark located on the South Downs near the small village of Wilmington on Windover Hill. Visible from the A27 this giant outline of a man with poles can be seen from quite a distance. I parked up at the nearby car park at about 5:50am and set off with the 1D MKIIN and 17-40mm lens. My plan was to capture the Long Man with the first golden light from the rising sun adding dynamic shape to the hills and foreground. Initially the sun was a bit low and the light was quite flat and unexciting but as I worked my way along the walking path towards the Long Man the sun started to rise and light up the landscape. I picked a few locations along the way that contained good foreground interest and hopefully were a bit different from the shots you tend to see day to day. Early on the cloud cover was at about 50% and I had to do a fair bit of waiting around while the clouds blew through. When the sun was free to shine it was great light and lit up the hillside just as I'd hoped.

As always with my landscape shots I used my Manfrotto tripod as support and a shutter release cable to further reduce the chances of blurring the shot with camera shake. I also enabled mirror lockup under the custom functions which again is worth doing for static landscape photography. I set my camera to manual mode and opted for an aperture of around F/16 for a good depth of field. Early on my shutter speed was around 1/5th of a second but as the sun rose higher I was up to around 1/25th. In order to control the exposure of foreground and sky I tried two techniques. Firstly I used no filter and simply bracketed my shots. This allows the exposures to later be merged in Photoshop to produce a balanced exposure. This requires some manual work and also the foreground flowers were blowing in the wind which was likely to make merging the exposures a real pain. My next method was to attach one of my Cokin ND Graduated filters to the lens which I then aligned with the hill top to allow less light from the sky onto the sensor. This meant I could expose for the foreground and not worry about blowing out the brighter sky. This teachnique can work well, although my results with it have been mixed. On this occasion it seemed to work pretty well and that's good news as it saves me a chunk on post processing time at home.

I'll be processing the shots as soon as possible and will upload them when I get the chance. For now here is one of the shots I that I feel came together pretty well. I used a low angle to capture the water trough in the foreground. I like to try and keep some interest in that section of the frame to keep the viewer interested. It also sets the scene of a rural area quite nicely.

The Long Man of Wilmington at Dawn