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The welsh coast in January can be a forbidding and gloomy place, and so it proved to be during our family get together in a farmhouse near to Abersoch on the Llyn Peninsula.
In a brief respite from the rain, the more outdoorsy of us headed along the coast a little way to Porth Ysgo, with the teenagers wanting to explore the caves there, and me wanting to finally photograph the waterfall that cascades down the cliff face and empties out onto the beach.
Well, I achieved my purpose of photographing the falls, and with no sign of my grandchildren returning yet, I turned my camera round to see if I could take a meaningful photo of the beach below me in the grey light.
There was a fair old swell surging up the pebble beach in the stiff onshore breeze, with a nice grouping of three rocks being pounded by the breaking waves just off the shoreline.
I knew that a straight photo of the scene below me would be pretty uninteresting, so I went for an abstract sort of feel by sticking a 6 stop ND filter in front of my lens which gave me a thirty second exposure and turned the crashing sea into a milky blur, streaked with just enough detail to suggest movement.
Set against the static, black rocks the blurred water looked great, and once back home I converted the image to monochrome to emphasise that contrast.
A few minutes later, when it was nearly dark, my grandchildren re-emerged and we wound our soggy way back to car as the rain started coming down yet again.
Never mind though, sometimes a gloomy day is just what you need for a dramatic photo.
Filename - porth ysgo 01.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 105mm
Exposure - 30 secs @ f22, ISO100
Location - Porth Ysgo, Llyn Peninsula, Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - Neutral density filter used to prolong exposure time
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