Saddle Tor (Northern Quarries), Dartmoor National Park

Saddle Tor (Northern Quarries), Dartmoor

By the last day of my recent trip to Dartmoor, the endless blue skies were starting to get tiresome.  O' for a few wisps of cloud and some drama!  Spring was definitely announcing its imminent arrival tho.  By day it was tee-shirt weather but once the sun set it was full-on winter duvet weather :-)  It felt somewhat silly leaving the truck in warm sunshine but packing boots and winter clothing!

Please click on the image to see a larger version.

Although the sky was clear there was always a thickish layer of cloud hugging the ground like a duvet.  Perhaps mother nature knew winter wasn't quite over.  Like heavy mist it significantly reduced visibility and looked like smog.  Not very attractive.  Big landscape shots just didn't work.  Come the last rays of a day, it reliably gave a nice orange band across the horizon but not much more.  That low cloud can just be seen in the photograph above towards the left-hand side.

I've photographed and posted regarding these rocks previously.  Their discovery was a genuine organic first for me, but since then I've come to realise they are quite famous, why I don't know, and I usually spot someone with a tripod in the area.  One of these days I will enquire of others what drew them to the rocks.  On this occasion I wanted a different perspective and something that captured the soft orange glow from the setting sun.   The square format is the result of three images stitched with Affinity Photo - my favourite bitmap editor now I've escaped the clutches of Adobe.

I will just plug the Affinity suite of applications as they are truly fantastic and I'm very, very happy to support the company.  I've used Photo for over a year now and I've not missed or regretted the absence of Photoshop.  It is a superb application and I'm really looking forward to the forthcoming next release.  The application is feature rich and, importantly, stable on Mac.  Previously I've used Illustrator for logo's and artwork needing vector graphics; Affinity Designer has all the capabilities of Illustrator I need and is easy to use.  The third application I used, all be it, infrequently was InDesign, so I'm really looking forward to the forthcoming release of Publisher which is currently in public Beta.  Moving to Capture One and the Affinity suite has saved me hundreds of Pounds per year.  If you haven't tried the Affinity apps, then I recommend you download and try the trial versions.

Andy