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Llanbedrog Cottage #1

Cottage on the beach at Llanbedrog on the Llyn Peninsula, Wales

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The story behind this image

Situated at the southern end of the beach at Llanbedrog on the Llyn Peninsula, this olde worlde cottage just seems to encapsulate the ambiance of genteel decay that prevades the welsh coast.

It actually took me several attempts to take the original photo from which this rendition was created, as the bright white walls of the cottage just kept on over-exposing.

In the end, I needed to dial in much more negative exposure compensation than I'm used to to preserve the highlights, which meant I had to open up the shadows significantly in post-processing to give detail in the trees.

Technology to the rescue, as I've just updated my workflow from Adobe Bridge + PhotoShop CS2 to Adobe Lightroom + PhotoShop CS6 (Cloud version), and I was amazed at how cleanly the new software was able to give me back the shadow detail without adding blotches of horrible noise to the image.

The final tweak was to convert the composition to monochrome, which I found to be more in keeping with the atmosphere of this sleepy welsh seaside resort than the original colour file.

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Image data

Filename - cottage llanbedrog 01.jpg

Camera - Canon 5D

Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm

Exposure - 1/30sec @ f8, ISO400

Location - Llanbedrog, Llyn Peninsula, Wales

This image - 800x800px JPEG

Conversion - Lightroom & PS-CS6

Comments - -1.3ev exposure compensation used to preserve highlights.