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6am on an early June morning and already the intensity of the sunlight is dazzling just an hour after sunrise.
I'd just finished an overnight time lapse shoot overlooking Cregennan Lakes to the south of the Snowdonia National Park in God's own country, Wales, and I was staggering back to my car for a kip before driving home when I was accosted by this beautiful scene just by the car park.
With a stand of trees glowing in the early morning light, and a light mist over the lake diffusing the beams of sunlight striking the flanks of Cader Idris in the background, I just couldn't pass by without capturing this loveliness in one last photo.
So it was out with all the gear again and with camera firmly mounted on my tripod I set about finding the best possible composition for this image, hurrying because all the while the sun was getting higher in the sky and the lovely quality of that low angled light would only have lasted a few more minutes.
Having found a composition that I liked I then started to sort out a correct exposure for the scene only to find that, unsurprisingly as I was shooting almost into the sun, there was no single exposure setting that would give me detail in the shadow areas of the image, under the trees, without blowing out the sky to a complete white, or visa versa.
In the end I needed three separate exposures, each 1 stop apart, to capture the full tonal range of the scene in front of me, to be blended together as an HDR file later on in Adobe Lightroom.
Back home, I was really pleased with how well Lightroom handled the HDR blend, with a very natural looking file that only needed a few minor tweaks to bring out the best of that lovely morning scene at Cregennan Lakes.
Filename - cregennan lakes 02.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 28mm
Exposure - Various @ f11, ISO100
Location - Cregennan Lakes, Snowdonia National Park, Mid Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - HDR blend of three separate exposures
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