Fresh Ground Photography

Late August Bank Holiday

Today is Bank Holiday Monday and Helen and I tried to get to a beach yesterday but just could not get anywhere near. Now Pembrokeshire is beautiful all the year round and it’s lovely that people come and visit and are able to experience the variety of landscapes that we have here. But today, we decided to go off the beaten track, just for some peace and quiet, away from the holiday hubbub.

I had the same setup that I was using for my last trip to Canaston Woods: a Canon 5D mkIV and a manual everything Lensbaby lens. We stopped at the tiny, extremely pretty, village of Gelli first of all. This shot was taken at 1/160s and f/5.6 with an ISO 200. There has been post processing here. I’ve cropped the image and I have also toned down the clarity and the texture within Adobe Lightroom to try to evoke a more dreamy feel to the picture. I did take three photographs of this scene and I changed the aperture on the lens in each one – just to control the light, and this is the one that I chose; it’s actually the darkest of the three pictures. I did consider an HDR image but soon changed my mind when I realised that I would lose the ripples on the water under the bridge. Maybe this is a picture to come back to with a different set of equipment.

After Gelli we drove through Llawhaden. We were all set to take photographs of the castle there but, again, the small carpark was full, so we headed South to Minwear Woods.

Minwear woods is on the opposite side of the road to Canaston Wood. Even though it was August Bank Holiday, Minwear Wood was quiet and magical; there were a number of cars parked in the car park but we met very few people today. This photograph was also taken with the Lensbaby, you can see the optical aberration around the edges (as with the main image). I like the dreamy images that this lens produces. I have reduced the saturation in this image during post production, I can’t explain why, I just feel that it looked better this way.

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