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This stitched panoramic photo shows the stunningly beautiful Cregennan Lakes, situated to the south of the Snowdonia National Park in Wales, just after sunrise on a crisp June morning with the peak of Cader Idris glowing in the early morning light.
This is an area of Snowdonia that Liz and I have only just recently discovered, and with late sunsets in the summer months we can easily manage the two hour drive from our home in North Wales, through the middle of the park, to reach here still with plenty of daylight left to enjoy and explore before darkness falls.
So what was I doing here at 6 o'clock in the morning?
Well I hadn't travelled all that way just to take a photo at sunrise, lovely though that turned out to be.
No, in fact I'd arrived at Cregennan Lakes the previous evening, with a plan to spend the night photographing the passage of the milky way over the lakes and mountains to make a time lapse video of the event.
In the end, my overnight shoot was highly successful (at least I think so!), although it did involve sitting on a rock halfway up the side of a hill for ten hours, by the end of which I was cold, cramped and ready to find the nearest cafe for a reviving coffee and bacon sandwich.
But I just couldn't tear myself away from the beauty unfolding in front of me as the newly risen sun shed its golden beams across the landscape in a captivating dance of light and shadow.
So I got all my camera gear and tripod back out and set up to shoot the several overlapping still images required to make this panoramic composition, showing the lakes and surrounding mountains in all their glory.
After a couple of sweeps of the scene at different exposures I finally decided to call it a day as the sun rose higher in the sky and the magic of that first light melded away into the harsher light of day.
Boy did I need that coffee!
Filename - cregennan lakes panorama 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - 1/20 sec @ f8, ISO100
Location - Cregennan Lakes, Snowdonia National Park, Wales
This image - 1200x370px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom and PhotoShop CC
Comments - Panoramic image made by stitching multiple exposures
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