I’ve just had another look at this image from from a few years back and was quite pleased with the result and decided to add it to my collection on Fine Art America, so I just thought I’d share the story behind it on here…

I’d been looking to get a nice lone tree with limestone pavement shot, typical of the Yorkshire Dales and someone had told me that there was a nice tree standing in an area of limestone alongside the Dales Way just above the village of Conistone (near Grassington) in Wharfedale.  So, one spring afternoon I decided to hike up there and take a look.

The tree was easy enough to find and I thought it worked well as a vertical composition and took a few shots when I found it, but it was clear that it was going to work much better as the sun went down.

Sunset wasn’t until between 7 and 8 pm at that time of year and I didn’t fancy hanging around for a few hours on the top of the hill, so I headed back down into Grassington for some tea and came back up later in the evening.

The transformation was amazing!  The setting sun added much more warmth and colour to the image, rather than the more bleached out look of the rock earlier in the afternoon, and all I had to do was adjust my viewpoint slightly to make best use of the prevailing light on the stones.

I kept on shooting after the sun dropped below the horizon to get some shots of the tree silhouetted against the colourful sky.

At the time it was the vertical shot of the rock and tree lit by the setting sun that grabbed my attention, but coming back to the sunset silhouette image recently, and spending a bit more time to make sure I had the levels adjusted correctly, I rather like it now!

Both the setting sun version and sunset silhouette versions are available as prints or canvases in my Fine Art America gallery.