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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 on a small single track road that runs along the side of the Nant Ffrancon valley, giving views up the the peaks of Tryfan, Pen-yr-Olwen and Y Garn.
Sun, bright clouds, directly lit snow combined with a foreground in shadow 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.
My usual trick of using a neutral density graduated filter in situations like this wouldn't work, as the filter would have darkened parts of the scene that didn't need it.
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 - tryfan 08.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 58mm
Exposure - Various @ f11, ISO100
Location - Tryfan, Snowdonia National Park, North Wales
This image - 800x450px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Manual blend of multiple exposures
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