This post is for the #wednesdaywalk challenge and the #makemesmile challenge collaboration. This collaboration initially took place once a month, but due to its popularity, @tattoodjay (of the #wednesdaywalk) and @elizacheng (of #makemesmile) decided to make it a weekly thing.
If you want to know more about the rules, visit this week's post by @tattoodjay where you will find all the rules at the bottom of his post after you've enjoyed his beautiful photos from his walk.
For quite some time I have been busy with various activities and I didn't have a lot of time to go out on walks. Hopefully this will start changing and I would be able to go exploring more often again. It should actually, as many of what I was busy with, will come in handy in the near future for my online activities. But that is a discussion for another day...lol.
Last weekend, we managed to go out to Monteseel again and enjoy an early morning outing in the fresh air of the Valley of a Thousand Hills.
Monteseel is a small suburb, almost like a community, situated in the Valley of a Thousand Hills, west of Durban, South Africa.
My plan was to be there before dawn, but I was exhausted after another hectic week and I decided to not set an alarm clock, which meant I got about an hour more sleep. Determined not to start rushing, we got ready and left for Monteseel.
We arrived just after sunrise. So, we had daylight, although it was not all that bright yet.
What was awesome though, was that we were still in time to get some shots of the low hanging clouds in the valley.
From where we moved around, we were looking down on the clouds in the valley below us. I didn't walk up to the edges this time, as I would have to pass through some wet grass to get there and I didn't feel like slipping and sliding with a camera in my hands...lol.
What a beautiful sight...
With the sun in the east, and just above the horizon, I had a bit of a challenge to get some of the shots I wanted. I didn't have anything to give protection to the lens, and having to take some shots almost into the sun, I tried to cover the lens from the sun as well as I could with my hand.
I wanted to highlight the white of the clouds as the sun was shining on them. Still being so early, the foreground came out dark, actually a good contrast between the bright white clouds below us, and the early-morning (almost dim) light in the foreground. Well...that's what I think. I would appreciate your opinion and any suggestions for better shots under these circumstances.
The next two photos are the exact same photo. In the second image, I slightly reduced the exposure to capture more of the detail in the clouds.
Which one do you prefer?
Capturing some early-morning colour of nature against the background of the clouds down below.
In the next two photos, I had to figure out how to cope with the glare of the sun again. But the view was spectacular. A photo doesn't really do it justice. It is something you have to see and experience the moment first-hand.
And I'll end this post with my last photo, getting a glimpse of the valley below us.
And that's it for today, folks.
Thank you for reading my post! I do appreciate it!