Snowdonia Break

We headed to Wales for a short break this week – to hike and to relax for a few days. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t on our side, so we only managed a short hike up Yr Aran, and decided to be ‘tourists’ and visit a few of Snowdonia’s top tourist spots.

Cwm Llan, Eryri.

Rhaeadr Ewynnol - Swallow Falls

The first photo is taken from the summit of Yr Aran, looking towards Snowdon and into Cwm Llan, and the second is a short test I did at the Swallow Falls waterfalls in Betws y Coed, playing with ‘long’ exposure in the daylight. I didn’t have my tripos with me, so this was as long as I could manage without getting some major motion blur.

Afon Llugwy, Swallow Falls.

Here’s something different than the usual – an almost abstract shot that I took of Afon Llugwy, which is much different from my usual panorama, it was nice to play around with this in Post, as I quite like the results.

Snowdonia Winter, early 2013

As I’ve updated my photography section I decided to head into my iPhoto to look for any un-stitched/edited panoramas that I might have hanging around, and boy – I found a couple of what I thought was really nice. I’m not too sure why they were left un-stitched, as I really love they way the came out, especially the first one, looking towards Snowdon (on the left), with the Nantlle Ridge swooping to the right, and Moel Hebog standing strong in the distance.

Yr Wyddfa o Moel Eilio

Craig Cwmbychan o Moel Eilio

Dyffryn Nantlle

The last is somewhat different. When I headed over to Wales a couple of weekends back to see my family and for my big Birthday, I decided one evening to scout the land for possible location ideas for a short film that I’m currently thinking about animating. I really like the location, and the old tree is perfect. Taken from the slopes of Mynydd Mawr, in Dyffryn Nantlle.

Wyddfa from Elidir Fawr, 24 hours time lapse

I had this great idea of somehow using a webcam that’s beautifully located on top of Elidir Fawr in Snowdonia to create a time lapse video of Snowdon. After trawling through the net, I came across a script that would work – but needed some tweaking, but in the end I managed to create something that would download a .jpg at 2 mins interval, over a 24 hour period from a provided URL (in this case, the Elidir Fawr webcam)

Here’s the first result of the first test:

[youtube width=”640″ height=”360″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3yah64nsYA[/youtube]

There’s a few black frames towards midday when the sun was directly shines into the camera (I guess this is what’s causing this to happen?), but I think the test came out really well.

Yesterday, I asked a fellow colleague and super talented Luke Harris if he could think of a super efficient way of creating such a project, and he (within 15 mins!!) wrote a whole new script that does exactly what I want it to do, with all sorts of epic features – so stay tuned, I’m going to be testing his script over the next few days/weeks as I have something really cool in mind with this medium.

 

 

 

Nant-y-Betws

As the sun was blasting, and the promise of a lovely sunset was imminent. I headed up Craig Cwmbychan, (the ‘head’ of the elephant that is Mynydd Mawr) to try and capture the sunset, blasting through Nant-Y-Betws below.

Nant-y-Betws

So here’s Nant-y-Betws, looking over from Craig Cwmbychan, Mynydd Mawr towards Moel Eilio, and Snowdon on the far right. Llyn Cwellyn can also be seen below.

Tiss a lovely Valley.

Llanberis Pass

Whilst closely watching the sun setting on Monday, I headed up the beautiful Llanberis pass, hoping that the sun will be blasting right up the valley, as it sometimes does – but I wasn’t in luck. The sun did however, set behind Llechog and Grib Goch, with a bright red hue.

Bwlch Llanberis - Llanberis Pass

This was taken just on the PYG track, Pen-Y-Pass. Grib Goch is the steep pyramid shaped peak on the left, while on the right of the valley, we have the terrain sweeping up to Bryn Du, and making it’s way up to Glyder Fawr.

Photography

I’m slowly in the process of re-vamping a lot of my website, especially how the photography section works. I’ve decided to use a pretty great Flickr Plug-in for my gallery, which does a great job at displaying my images.

Use the drop-down menu under the Photography tab at the top of the page to view my photos.

Here’s a couple of new Panorama images I’ve just stitched together today. The first is from Cors y Fron, located just outside the Snowdonia National Park, on the way out of Y Fron towards Llyn Ffynhonnau and Mynydd Mawr. The wee ruin is by far, located in one of the most beautiful spots in North Wales, overlooking nothing but the magnificent Nantlle Ridge. The second is a first try at a night panorama, taken ontop of Moel Eilio, on a Winters night, looking towards Y Glyderau and Snowdon. Snowdon is just under the moon.

An Autumn scene at Cors y Fron
Glyderau, Snowdon and the Moon

Cwm Idwal, Snowdonia. A Few Panoramas.

Towards the end of 2010, I headed back home to Wales from London for a nice long weekend to see my friends and family, and to go walking a wee bit. (And to test out my new kit!)

On a chilly and windy day, I headed up to Cwm Idwal to walk up the beautiful hanging valley with Neil, John and Del the dog.

We only did a quick loop on this run, starting from the Idwal Cottages below, heading into the Cwm itself, round the lake and up towards Clogwyn y Geifr, from there we headed straight up Y Garn, and down the path that leads towards the Pinnacle Crag, doing a nice tidy loop of the valley.

Whilst ontop of Y Garn, we almost nearly had a full cloud inversion, but the clouds quickly disbursed, but the view towards Snowdon was fantastic.

Here’s a collection of Panoramas taken on the trek:

Cwm Idwal. Tryfan, Glyder Fach, Glyder Fawr. Snowdonia, North Wales
Snowdon Inversion, taken from Y Garn
Cwm Idwal, looking towards Glyder Fawr & Castell y Geifr
God Rays, Cwm Idwal
Climbing in Cwm Idwal