Click on the image for licensing terms
Having taken many, many photos of Caernarfon Castle from the outside, my wife Liz and I finally made it through the entrance gate and spent a fascinating couple of hours exploring the nooks, crannies, towers, stairwells, courtyards and hidden corners of this magnificent pile.
Of course, given such an opportunity I went mad photographically speaking, and snapped everything I thought would make a good image at the time.
Thank goodness for digital, as I would have wasted a whole lot of money on film and processing had I been behaving like this in the 'good old days'!
Back home a few weeks later and a review of the shoot in a calmer, more analytic frame of mind, revealed that ninety nine percent of my images from that afternoon weren't worth a light, especially those I'd shot from outside standing in the exposed central courtyard.
Fortunately for me, I'd also taken a number of frames from within the walls themselves, and although shot in technically challenging low light / high contrast situations, it was these interior photos that had much more mystery and ambiance to them than the bland snapshots taken outside in plenty of light.
This spiral stone staircase is a good example.
With a shutter speed of 1/2 second hand held, I had to jam the camera up against the wall to steady it while I took this shot, and the original RAW file was so dark I'm suprised at how much shadow detail I was able to recover in Adobe Lightroom to amke this final image.
Filename - castle caernarfon interior 02.jpg
Camera - Nikon D3100
Lens - 18-55mm zoom @ 48mm
Exposure - 1/2sec @ f5.6, ISO400
Location - Caernarfon, North Wales
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - -2ev exposure compensation used to reduce exposure time.
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.