Sunset From Killean

Recently I decided to head out with the camera to capture the Sunset From Killean.

I had been up this way on the day the beast from the east came through as a recce and even though it was nearly a white out I did manage to see between the snow showers that there was an image from this area.

I decided that I needed to be up on Cnoc Odhar Auchaluskin hill to get the best image.

Sunset was at 1841, so I left the house about 1710 thinking 15 – 20 minute drive and 45 minutes to get up there…NOPE!!!

Poor Judgment

Not a chance, After parking the car up I headed up the track to the area I was going to cross a river to start my ascent, and this is where it went wrong.

I wasted 15 minutes trying to find a way across the river, I then decided to try and cross over some rocks but slipped and ended up with a soaked foot, and didn’t get across.

I headed back up river in desperation and came across a makeshift bridge, if only I had gone that way at the start. I managed across and started to climb up the steep embankment to start the hill walk.

By this time I was concerned about how long it was going to take to get to the top. Climbing the embankment was hard going, water was running down the side making it really slippy and there wasn’t much space for placing my feet, in parts I was on my knee so as not to slip.

At this point I decided to head for plan ‘B’. If I was going up the hill and camping or coming down a different way then fine, but seeing as I wasn’t going to camp and I didn’t know the area coming back down in the dark this way would be to dangerous.

This was poor judgement on my behalf.

Here’s a map of the area with my route:

Re-Locate

I headed back up on to the track and onto the hillside on the opposite side, initially it wasn’t looking good and I was considering heading back down to an area I noticed on the way up that would have been a last resort.

Time was against me now, the sun was getting really low but I decided to go for the higher ground.

My judgement paid off, after running up the hill and coming round the woodland the vista in front of me opened up, and there was some foreground interest, however I could tell that I was going to need a panoramic image to capture all of the scene and this location wasn’t suiting a pano, so on the travels again to the right for a couple of hundred meters.

Again, I got lucky here and found a good vantage point I was happy with for the panoramic.

Here is the Panoramic image I captured:

Canon 6D, Tamron 24-70mm at 36mm, F11, ISO 100, 0.8 second exposure, 9 image Pano.

Stitching Problems

Now, I Have had issues with pano’s in the past, mostly with the software but possibly in my setup also. I do make sure my tripod is level but when I pan the camera, especially large pano’s like this my in camera level starts to show that the camera is uneven, mostly when I come off central axis and get to the left or right side of the image.

This is possibly causing issues with stitching as I had major issues stitching this pano in Photoshop, Microsoft ICE and Hugin.

So much so that I have had enough of pano’s for now, I can’t be bothered wasting time in post editing anymore with them.

Last Light

After packing up and heading back I headed back the way I came I just had to get a single image of Cara with the last of the light from the setting sun. I used the huge rock as my foreground to add a bit of weight to the foreground to balance the image out.

Canon 6D, Tamron 24-70mm F11, ISO 100, 25 second exposure.

I’m entering these images in The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge of Rise/Set this week.

Sunset is definitely my favourite time.