Well I suppose I can get props for that, but sadly the pictures didn't come out as I wanted. Basically the light was too poor, and there was too much cloud cover for what I wanted. I'm thinking for the shots I want I might need to wait until a cloudless night, although when that will be I would hate to guess. I tell you though, I can't do too many starts like a month.
I left the house today at about 03:50am, and headed up to Winsford Hill. This is quite a nice place that good commanding views across Exmoor. I figured this would give it a good chance of picking up the the morning sun and give some really nice backdrops. Another good point about this location is that the 1,760 acres of heather moorland are home to the "Anchor" herd which is quite a large herd of Exmoor ponies. And the more ponies the greater chance of spotting some.
There are actually two peaks of interest in this location, Winsford Hill proper and Draydon Knap. You can see the peaks and the route I walked overlayed on the following map:
I started at Draydon Knap becuase it has a better car park. There are only limited areas where a non high ride 4x4 can comfortably go. A saloon car like mine tends to scrape the underside on the rocks in certain places so it's not all the much fun.
I found a small herd of ponies, two foals and about 5 mares spread about. As the sun came up the light was absolutely fantastic. The sky went though so many glorius shades or red, yellow and orange. Well, the very small strip below the clouds did.
The problem with the clouds meant that the light level was very low. My telephoto isn't the fastest, and is f/5.6 at 210mm. An f/2.8 will have to wait because it's too much money. So at f/5.6 I was struggeling to get any better than about 1/6 second at ISO800. That's pretty slow, and grainy. I only had my monopod with me so camera shake has been a problem, but the ponies are not stationary so even their small movements, let alone when they were actually moving, has been a problem. Also the high ISO has caused a lot of noise, and the low light has caused a lot of problems with the auto-focus. It was forever hunting which take about a second to go from infinity to close and back out again.
This is a rather good image compared to some that I collected.
Eventually the ponies decided they didn't like where they were, or perhaps they didn't like me, and moved off to north down into the valley. That lost the angle I wanted and it was even darker anyway so I didn't follow. I scouted around for some more but seeing nothing moved the car up to Winsford Hill proper and looked around there. I found another few keeping close to the road, and I followed those for a while. They headed off into the heather so I went down to Spire Cross, then across to the Caractacus Stone. Seeing nothing I made my way back in a round about sort of way to the car.
Low and behold, as I neared the punch bowl I found a group of maybe 25 ponies. I'd lost the colour in the sky by then but I thought I'd try and get something. It's a funny thing about the exmoor ponies, or maybe this herd in particular. You can drive right up to them on the road, so close that with the windows down you could probably touch them. But get within about 200 yards on foot and they decided they want to be somewhere else. And the noise I was making with waterproofs on they could probaby hear me coming from a mile away.
So here is a group that was already well underway by the time I had gotten close enough for a picture:
This was quite a nice group really. They decided to head roughly south from their position so I was able to intercept them and close the distance pretty well. I got pretty close at times:
As we neared the road, I was able to get some really nice angles and use the terrain to sneak up on some. But the lack of adequate light still caused a shutter speed problem. I think this could be really good if he had his head still or I could have used a faster shutter.
I did get one really nice capture though I think. I'm quite pleased with this, although I had to HDR process the image to get the colours ricer and get some light back into the image. I basically underexposed it by quite a lot (1/50 @ f/5.6, ISO 200) because I was concious of the noise and I wanted to control the shutter more. I figured a dark image is easier to lighten in photoshop than a light image can be darkened so I'd hope I could bring it out.
I gave up shooting at about 7am, which meant I could be home by 8am. Time for a quick nap and then some breakfast! I got just over 100 exposures, and I've probably culled about 20 or more so far. I'm just going to see if there is anything I can recover from the others.
Next time I'm hoping for a little less cloud and a little more more light. I might also take some carrots or suger cubes or something. Or I'll get some camo gear and crawl around on my belly. I really need to work out how to get closer to those ponies.
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