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Unlike its much loved and cared for sister at Llandudno, the old pier at Colwyn Bay on the North Wales coast is a picture of neglect and dereliction, fenced off from the general public as a site hazard.
But in amongst the collapsing roofs and rusting railings there's a melancholy beauty present for those with an eye to see it.
Normally I love to photograph beautiful landscapes, of which North Wales has plenty to offer, but I find myself also attracted to decay and dereliction and you'll find plenty of examples of this other side of me here at goHOWiE.com.
But photographing decay requires a different mindset to that employed when photographing natural beauty, and sometimes it's more of a challenge to bring out the mood of such a place, conveying the sense of melancholy and futility that such scenes convey, while still portraying something of the faded grandeur that there once was in these old buildings.
To help with the need to express a mood, sympathetic lighting is required.
A bright sunny day can be much too cheerful, and a day with thick cloud cover is usually much more in keeping with the sombre nature of the subject.
Such was the weather on this particular day, with a textured sky dropping occasional drizzle over the North wales coast as a few brave souls braved the cold to play on the beach.
I started off by taking a 'normal' exposure of this scene, but I found that the sky just wasn't dramatic enough to convey the dark and brooding mood that I wanted over the pier.
So I re-took the shot, this time using a 10 stop neutral density filter and a 2 stop neutral density graduated filter to slow the exposure right down and darken the sky, allowing the clouds, which appeared very static in the original photo, to blur into much more dramatic patches of light and dark.
The ambience of this second, longer, exposure was much closer to what I wanted to achieve, but I wasn't finished yet, converting the final image to monochrome to further enhance the sombre mood around the derelict structure of the pier.
Filename - colwyn bay pier 01.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 30 secs @ f8, ISO100
Location - Colwyn Bay, North Wales
This image - 800x450px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - Tripod, mirror lockup and cable release used to prevent camera movement
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