Rain at Englethwaite Hall Lake

This image was taken as a panoramic series of 6 RAW photo files at 3:50 pm on the 4th July 2025. The files were later combined and further developed with Luminar Neo.

We had just arrived at Englethwaite Hall Caravan Club Site that day. Gill was feeling tired after a busy week looking after our grandsons, Leo and Asher, and all the packing for the short holiday break. So once we were set up on our fully-serviced pitch, I went to the on-site lake alone while she rested.

I love sites like this with photography walks within the grounds.

The Capture Process

I put my camera (Sony A6000) in manual focus and set it about a third into the scene. In fully manual exposure, I had aperture at my usual f/8, ISO at the base of 100, and I exposed just underneath the highlight threshold for the brightest part of the scene, which gave a shutter speed of 1/160s.

With the camera hand-held in portrait orientation, I took a set at 12mm and then a set at 10mm, taking care to overlap the content by 40-50%.

It’s been a while since I created a panorama. The last time I made a pano was with Lightroom in 2017, and it was of the same lake here at Englethwaite!

Development

This was the first time I had used Luminar Neo’s panoramic stitching facility. The process is not quite as simple as the HDR blending. If, as you should, you do preliminary development of the RAW files beforehand, it forgets them during the blending.

But there’s a workaround. If you export your Develop RAW edits as TIFF files, with the pixels now “born”, you get to keep the processing with good image quality for the pano stitching.

Initial blending and development looked good, but I wished I had took at least one more shot at either end. So I tried Neo’s Gen Expand to include further content. It did a great job of finding well-suited trees, but the small details weren’t a good match, so I got to work with the clone tool.

Lots of dodging, burning and other editing was done. I came close to publishing it a few times but kept returning with refreshed eyes and new ideas until I finally thought it was finished.

Comments welcome below …