Llyn Ogwen, Snowdonia National Park, Wales

Llyn Ogwen #3

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The story behind this image

A lovely sunny afternoon in late August found my wife Liz and I enjoying the scenery around the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales.

One of the loveliest and most popular spots is the Ogwen valley, sandwiched bwetween the Glyderau mountains to the south and the Carneddau range to the north.

Along the bottom of the valley lies Llyn Ogwen, a haven for walkers, photographers and lovers of the great outdoors like myself.

Walking along the side of the lake towards the visitors' centre at the far end, I spotted this tiny little pebble beach, with interesting rocks and grasses at the water's edge.

So I climbed down from the path above and spent a few minutes framing up this composition, looking along the lake to the monolith of Y Garn at the head of the Nant Ffrancon valley.

The scene was just lovely, bathed in the warm sunshine and with some high altitude wispy white clouds reflecting in the surface of the lake below.

However, the sky was much too bright to fit into the dynamic range of my camera's sensor without rendering the darker areas of the view a murky grey mush.

My usual recourse in a situation like this is to fit a neutral density graduated filter over my camera's lens, reducing the brightness of the sky to a more manageable level.

But in this case the filter would have also darkened the mountains, which I didn't want.

So instead, with my camera firmly mounted on my tripod, I took five seperate frames, starting with an exposure that was suitable for the sky and increasing each exposure by one stop until I finsished with an exposure that showed good detail in the darkest parts of the image.

I then used Adobe Lightroom's HDR blend function to combine the five differently exposed RAW files into a single HDR file that showed good detail in the brightest and darkest areas of the image.

A few more tweaks to enhance constrast and colour and I ended up with this rather appealing final image, showing all the lovely aspects of the view, pretty much as I experienced it at the time.

I just love working with digital image capture and processing, as I can bring scenes like this one to life in a way that would have been impossible with film.

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Image data

Filename - llyn ogwen 03.jpg

Camera - Canon 6D

Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 24mm

Exposure - Various @ f16, ISO100

Filters - Polarising filter used to remove glare

Location - Llyn Ogwen, Snowdonia National Park, North Wales

This image - 800x533px JPEG

Conversion - Adobe Lightroom

Comments - Multiple exposures use to create HDR rendition