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For a few days in early May 2016, a brief wave of summer weather washed over our home patch of North Wales.
Determined to make the most of this all too rare opportunity, my wife Liz and I headed over to the beautiful Isle of Anglesey to walk on a few of our favourite beaches.
We started off at Aberffraw on the west coast, strolling on the sand under a blazing afternoon sun.
Great for a paddle but rubbish for any sort of 'grand landscape' photography, although I did manage to snap the odd sand dune and patch of marram grass.
After tea at another of our favourite spots, Porth Trwyn, we headed over to one of the nicest spots to watch a sunset that I know of - Church Bay (or Porth Swtan in welsh).
We arrived just at the start of happy hour, about an hour before sunset, just after the tide started coming back up the beach.
Unlike early in the day, the light was now superb, with a layer of cloud taking the edge off the sun's brightness, allowing me to take a single shot using a 3 stop ND graduated filter that gave me detail in both shadow and highlight areas of the frame.
I also had a 6 stop ND fitted to my lens, to increase the exposure time for the shot which allowed small ripples in the water to smooth out and thus improve the clarity of the reflections.
I always use the 'old fashioned' mechanical approach to controlling contrast wherever possible, as I still feel that using a filter gives a more natural look to the final image than HDR processing or manual layer blending can achieve.
But getting back to the beach at Church Bay, that low tide had left some pretty impressive tidal pools and partly submerged rocks to include as foreground interest and focal points, so I made the most of the revealed beauty, taking multiple images of the various features as the tide inexorably crept back up the beach as the sun set into the Irish Sea for another day.
Filename - church bay sunset 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 28mm
Exposure - 2 secs @ f22, ISO100
Location - Church Bay, Anglesey, North Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC
Comments - Tripod, mirror lock up and cable release used to prevent camera movement
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