A hot weekend in mid June and I had mostly been stuck indoors.  I not fancy doing my usual walks in the morning so headed out Sunday evening to catch a sunset from Wilmington Hill in east Sussex.

Long Man of Wilmington

I had been researching where the sun would be setting this time of year via Photopills.  The view from atop of Wilmington Hill is one of my favourites in east Sussex on the south downs.  I was keen to catch a sun setting in the distance between Bo Peep and Mount Caburn.

The original plan was to do a 5 mile walk around Folkington hill pass Jevington and then back to Wilmington Hill, being setup and ready for the sun to set around 9:15pm.  But this time it would be just about landscape photography and not hiking.

I parked up at Wilmington after 7pm, the car park was empty now and made my way to the escarpment of the south downs.  Immediately I had to setup up the camera and start shooting, the moon was low in the sky, the low light of the sun was lighting up the long man and hills very nicely.

For when the sun set over the south downs I was looking to include some foreground interest on top of Wilmington Hill and I think I found a good candidate in form of a lone wind swept stunted tree.  Already it was making a good landscape subject with the long grass in the foreground and the moon in the background.

With the low light of the sun dropping the views east were breathtaking.  Always on the lookout for some foreground interest in the form of flowers I found some Orchids but probably not get down low enough.

Sun settings

Now the sun was setting and the sky was turning red.  I was having exposure problems due to the contrast of the bright sky and dark ground, beyond the dynamic range of my camera.  Initially I was also having problems with sun flare. Directly facing the sun I removed my polarising filter.

For the first time I stacked two hard edge graduated ND filters giving a 5 stop light reduction of the sky, this balanced out my histogram.  The photos looked good on the back of the 3″ camera screen but back home post-processing I was not so impressed.  The sharpness has been softened by  the stacking of the filters.  Compared to the sharpness of the sunset landscape photos I had taken from Firle they were not as good.  I would have been better off only using the single 3 stop filter and maybe bracketing a few shots.

Still it was fantastic being up on top of Wilmington hill all on my own enjoying this magnificent scenery.  I actually took my favourite shot on the way back down with the silhouette of that lone windswept stunted tree sometime after the sun had disappeared behind the distant horizon.

It looked like we would have another week of this good weather so I intended to return to Wilmington hill a few more evenings to practice taking more sunset landscape photos.