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I'd been tramping through the snow on the shores of Llyn Mymbry in Snowdonia on a grey overcast day, hoping for a few shafts of sunlight to light up the landscape for me, but my hope was in vain.
What to do when that grand scene that you had in mind to photograph just isn't working? The weather's pants, the light's flat and your fingers and toes are dropping off?
It's in conditions like these that the intimate landscape can come to your rescue, as it did for me with this shot of a few dead twigs sticking up out of the snow.
This shot just wouldn't have worked if the sun had been shining, as the reflected light off the snow would have rerquired such a low exposure to stop it blowing out that the delicately lit and coloured twigs would have lost all detail and become just featureless black silhouettes.
As it was, the flat light allowed me to capture detial in both the snow and the twigs in what, to my mind, is a beautifully subtle minimalist composition.
Filename - snow twig 03.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 50mm prime
Exposure - 1/500sec @ f7.1, ISO200
Location - Llyn Mymbry, Snowdonia
This image - 800x533px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - +1 stop over exposure used to render snow as white.
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