46.3

"Good heavens! What a surprise, finding that photographer here in the grass."
I saw these two stragglers while the small herd of Exmoor ponies had already moved further down the road (to my left). I had a wide-angle (28 mm equivalent) lens and wanted to get them in the foreground of the photo, against the beautiful morning sky. I knelt down in the grass, with an angle finder in place, so I would not be looking directly at my subject (Rolleiflex style) and could hopefully get some good shots from a very low viewpoint. I waited while they were slowly coming closer. I expected them to be a bit curious, so they might want to look me over and pause a bit. When they were in front of me, I started to make some exposures with the lens pre-focussed at the hyperfocal distance (using a small aperture for enough depth of field), because I only could see the silhouettes of their heads against the sun, and I knew the camera wouldn’t autofocus well under these circumstances. I’m not sure whether I should have exposed manually for the foreground and let the sky take care of itself. In this case, anyway, I used auto exposure, and then a heavy dose of HDR control in DxO Optics Pro, in combination with post-processing in NIK Color Efex Pro, brought the detail back in the shadows, while the sky was already near to perfect.

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