The Brecon Beacons… Circa 2019…
The Brecon Beacons
This post is only a year late… But the spare time afforded by the Covid-19 lockdown seems as good a reason as any to get out of the present and take a trip down memory lane.
This time last year, my co-conspirator Matt Brewer and I took a decidedly unplanned weekend to photograph the Brecon Beacons. One cheap Airbnb and a somewhat circuitous route to the heartlands of Wales and we were marching up Pen-y-Fan, wondering when it was that we’d become so old and unfit,
Planning and Unplanned Landscape Photo
Neither Matthew or I had been up Pen-y-Fan before, nor had we researched it at all, so we were walking pretty blindly in terms of what images we were looking to take. It would be mid afternoon when we got to the summit and we thought that we might wait around for sunset if the clouds looked like they were playing ball. So upon arrival we set about looking for interesting shots to take with an eye out for interesting parts to include in a sunset image, using an app to workout roughly where and when the sun was going to hit the horizon.
(1) Here I tried to create depth with the diagonal line running through from corner to corner and with the light and dark of the snow and shadow. I tried to use the hikers on the ridge for scale, but they didn’t really stand out enough in the image to have much effect.
I spent a lot of time looking for compositions for the jagged cliffs that fall away in every direction from Pen-y-Fan. They’re incredibly dramatic, but landscape photos often fall flat if you can’t demonstrate a sense of scale and depth, so it was important to find a composition that tries to incorporate both of these. (1)
Finding foreground elements within a landscape is one element of photography that I find particularly challenging. In an ideal world, when composing a shot, you would want a clearly distinct foreground, middle ground and background element that are all neatly tied together with a common thread…
(2) Adding a foreground element doesn’t always help an already boring photo though.
…In reality it’s much easier to look at an obvious middle ground landscape feature, wait for it to have a nice sky in the background and walk away knowing that you’ve taken a pretty photo of an object. But including a foreground element can bring so much more to an image. (2)
Seeing a lake (Llyn Cwm Llwch) at the bottom of one of the cliff faces which I thought might add scale, and having found some snow covered rocks to use as a foreground, I set up with my camera on its tripod, coovered it in an unnecessary array of Formatt-Hitec filters and waited for sunset.
I tried taking the shot a couple of ways, first was using only a polariser to help with reflections from the lake and the snow. I had to shoot it as a HDR to compensate for the shadows in the valley below being so much darker than the sky.
Sunset didn’t disappoint!
The final way was to wait for the sky to darken slightly and use a 6 stop filter, this was to make the image a little less contrasty and to use the movement in the clouds to smooth out the sky. The sky also started to become more pastel shades than fiery orange, which gives the image a much more calmer feeling. Which do you prefer? Let me know!
Take Two! - 68s f/13 ISO 100 26mm (Nikon D750 + Nikkor 24-85mm f/3.5/4.5)