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An unseasonal cold snap in April 2016 left a delicate covering of snow over the high peaks of the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales, so the first opportunity we got, my wife Liz and I set out to view the beauties of sun on snow at some our our favourite viewpoints.
One such spot is a pull in by the side of the A5 at Capel Curig, overlooking the lovely Llyn Mymbyr with the snow dusted peak of Moel Siabod (shapely hill in Welsh) rising above the forested banks of the lake.
Sun, bright clouds, directly lit snow combined with dark fir trees was always going to be a challenge to photograph, with a contrast range across the frame far in excess of what the camera's sensor could cope with, even with the help of a carefully placed neutral density graduated filter.
So I ended up taking five frames at different shutter speeds to make sure I'd got data across the entire tonal range of the scene for a subseqent HDR blend in Adobe Lightroom.
For once the HDR blend didn't work so well, probably because of the moving clouds, so instead I loaded the separate images into Photoshop as layers, and manually blended the image using layer masks to select the 'best bits' from each exposure.
A time consuming task, but such a beautiful scene deserved some extra effort on my part.
Filename - moel siabod 07.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 45mm
Exposure - Various @ f11, ISO100
Location - Moel Siabod, Snowdonia National Park, North Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Manual blend of multiple exposures
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