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It was only half past four in the afternoon, and up here at a latitude of 53°N the sun had already disappeared below the southwestern horizon over half an hour ago.
My wife Liz and I had taken advantage of a brief spell of good weather (rare in November up here in North Wales!) to venture out through the beautiful Snowdonia National Park and onto the North Walea coast at Caernarfon.
We arrived at Caernarfon just in time for sunset, and having spent some time photographing around the Victoria Dock, using the last vestiges of direct light to paint lovely warm tones over the boats and buildings, we headed into the harbourside Galeri Café for some much needed refreshment.
When we'd finished our coffees we headed back out to the harbour wall overlooking Victoria Dock to be greeted by a sky filled with a wonderful twilight colour contrast of orange and blue, while the yachts moored below us were casting perfect reflections in the mirror-like water of the harbour.
Time for one last photo shoot before heading home then.
But I had a bit of a technical issue in that, even with a neutral density graduated filter fitted to my camera to darken the sky, I couldn't fit the entire tonal range of the scene into one single exposure, either the sky was too bright or the boats in shadow below me were too dark.
So to overcome this problem, and achieve a reasonable exposure in all areas of this composition, I removed the filter and instead took five separate exposures with my camera mounted on a tripod.
Each exposure was increased by one stop from the previous, until I had a set of images with detail right from the brighest part of the sky to the deepest shadow area.
Back home I then subjected these five exposures to a 'Blend to HDR' function in Adobe Lightroom, resulting in the rather pleasing final image shown here, featuring colours and details right across the frame.
Well worth making a bit of extra effort to do justice to such a lovely scene.
Filename - caernarfon harbour 10
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - Various shutter speeds @ f8, ISO100
Filters - None.
Location - Victoria Dock, Caernarfon, North Wales
Image enhancements - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - This image is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) blend of five separate exposures, each one stop apart.
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