English Autumnal landscape

Barrow Wake is a well-known viewpoint near the village of Birdlip in Gloucestershire, England. It has fine views from its seat on the Cotswolds, looking West over the Vale of Gloucester towards the distant Malvern Hills.

The view was particularly fine earlier this week when I happened to be passing through the village. The rich autumnal colours looked stunning in the late afternoon sunlight, adding a wonderful luminescence to the bright green fields and bronze tree foliage. The sun’s low angle in the sky also emphasised the interesting landforms.

I took three photographs (DMC-GF2, 14mm (28mm), f11.0, 1/60th, ISO100, handheld). It is always good to fix as many settings as possible when taking photos that you intend to link later in a panorama. So, if you can adjust manual settings on your camera, select a suitable aperture (f stop) and focus point. I stitched these together, using the excellent program Hugin – panorama photo stitcher, to create this panorama. Hugin is a very powerful program which enables all types of panoramas to be created, including 360 degree images in different perspectives: see some inspiring examples. Not only is it powerful and flexible but as it is open source program it is free to download. Post editing in Adobe Lightroom allowed some fine tweaking using saturation, clarity settings, and a subtle graduation filter to be added to the sky.