Click on the image to view a larger version, then click your browser's 'BACK' button to return to this page.
One of my wife Liz's and my favourite spots to pull the car over and enjoy a coffee is the car park adjoining the RSBP centre at Conwy on the North Wales coast.
Not that I'm particularly interested in watching or photographing wildlife, although there's plenty of that around.
No, it's the views up the river Conwy tidal estuary towards the mountains of Snowdonia that entrances us.
What the the vageries of tide, light and weather, the view here is never the same twice.
On the occasion I took the images for this panoramic collage, the skies overhead were leaden with threatening clouds, but through gaps in the overcast, beams of sunlight were playing over the exposed sands in a chiarscuro dance.
The contrast of a glowing golden landscape set against the dark grey of the heavens obviously required a photograph, but the long, flat layout of the landscape didn't suit a standard image aspect ratio, so I took multiple overlapping exposures, very fast to catch the transient light, and then assembled them together to give a final composition that encompassed most of the estuary that I could see.
A few minutes later and the gaps in the clouds had closed, the sunlight had vanished from the land and everywhere was a uniform grey.
But for those few moments the view was just pure magic.
Filename - conwy estuary panorama 02.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 82mm
Exposure - 1/60 sec @ f11, ISO100
Filters - 2 stop neutral density graduated filter used to darken the sky
Location - Conwy RSPB Centre, North Wales
This image - 1200x229px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and PhotoShop CC
Comments - Panoramic image made by stitching multiple exposures
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.