Click on the image for licensing terms
The Snowdonia National Park is a fantastic photographers' playground of mountains, lakes, coast, forests, waterfalls, historical buildings and so on.
In fact, it's hard to decide where to go next for a visual treat.
But on this bright, cold, early spring afternoon, with a dusting of snow on the peaks of the Glyderau range, Llyn Idwal was a pretty obvious choice.
Nestled in a basin, surrounded by high peaks and backed by the aptly named Devil's Kithchen, this is a gem of a spot, with beautiful views in every direction.
My interest on this occasion lay in picturing the lake with the snow dusted mountains in the background, but unfortunately this involved photographing almost directly into the sun.
Although the sun was hidden behind the dramatic clouds swirling over the Glyderau the sky was still way much brighter than the land below, causing me a real contrast problem.
Normally under situations like this I'll try and use a 2 or 3 stop ND grad filter over my camera lens to darken the sky, but with the uneven contours of the mountains this wasn't possible, as I would have ended up darkening the peaks - not what I wanted to do.
So instead I took five exposures with my camera firmly fixed to my tripod, bracketing the exposures by two stops each to give me RAW files in camera that captured the full range of tones in the scene.
Back home, and more in hope than expectation, I loaded the five RAW files into Adobe Lightroom and told it to create an HDR exposure blend.
Well I was highly suprised and delighted with the result, which was a low contrast but quite natural looking DNG file with detail everywhere.
A few further tweaks in Lightroom gave the result shown here, which is much closer to my recollection of the scene than could have been captured in a single exposure.
And by the way, that tiny speck in the upper left hand corner of the frame isn't a dust spot on the camera's sensor. It is, in fact, a rescue helicopter on a training mission.
Filename - llyn idwal 02.jpg
Camera - Canon EOS 6D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm
Exposure - Various @ f16, ISO100
Location - Llyn Idwal, Snowdonia National Park, Wales
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - HDR blend of multiple exposures
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.