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The Snowdonia National Park is a fantastic photographers' playground of mountains, lakes, coast, forests, waterfalls, historical buildings and so on.
In fact, it's hard to decide where to go next for a visual treat.
But on this bright, cold, early spring afternoon, with a dusting of snow on the peaks of the Glyderau range, a trek up to Llyn Idwal was a pretty obvious choice.
The path up to Llyn Idwal crosses over the runoff stream via a picturesque wooden bridge, from which you get this famous view of a waterfall, topped by a bent and twisted old tree and backed by the peaks of the Glyderau range of mountains.
You might think that such a wonderful combination of elements would make it easy to get a good photo from here, but proved to be far from the case on this occasion, with the contrast difference between the sky and land far exceeding what could be recorded with a single exposure.
So in the end I took five separate bracketed exposures to capture the entire dynamic range of the scene in front of me.
Back home I tried both a manual layer blend in Photoshop and an HDR blend in Lightroom to see which resulted in the best looking fianl image, with the Lightroom HDR blend winning due to enhanced detail in the waterfall.
Even so, the colour image looked somewhat ordinary, with lowish contrast and dingy colours, so a conversion to warm monochrome and a contrast boost was applied to bring the final image to life, conveying more of the drama I felt while I was actually there.
And that's what I try to acheive at the end of the day. An image that conveys my emotions as well as recording beautiful scenery.
Filename - llyn idwal 04.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 28mm
Exposure - Various @ f16, ISO100
Location - Llyn Idwal runnoff, Snowdonia National Park, Wales
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - HDR blend of multiple exposures
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