Click on the image for licensing terms
A typical cloudy late autumn afternoon at Llandudno on the North wales coast ended unexpectedly as the setting sun found a gap in the clouds on the horizon and shone a searchlight beam of horizontal golden light onto the scene.
This was one of those rare but wonderful occurences when I was in the right place, at the right time, with camera equipment to hand and able to capture this fleeting moment of ethereal beauty.
My wife Liz and I had enjoyed a stroll along Llandudno's promenade and we were making our way by car along the panoramic drive around the Great Orme heading for the West Shore when this shaft of light hit the Little Orme over on the far side of Llandudno Bay.
I screeched to a halt in a convenient layby (how often does that happen?!) and rapidly assembled my camera gear, including tripod and ND grad filter, to get as many exposures as I could before the shaft of light disappeared.
This image, zoomed in to feature just a part of the pier, was processed from the last exposure I took, with the limestone of the Little Orme glowing in last of the sun's dying rays.
A few seconds later and the sun had sunk below the horizon, returning the scene before me to a uniform shade of grey, puncuated only by the lights of the pier, shing against the gathering darkness.
The whole show only lasted two or three minutes, but they were two or three minutes of wonder, captured forever in the photos I was able to capture.
Filename - llandudno pier 20.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 67mm
Exposure - 1/25 sec @ f8, ISO200
Location - Llandudno, North Wales
This image - 800x450px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Tripod, mirror lockup and cable release used to prevent camera movement
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.