North Wales - 2/2 - Iestyn Roberts' Blog

November 21, 2011November 21, 2011

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.

November 17, 2011

Cwm Bwlch y Moch, Snowdonia

I headed back to North Wales for a couple of weeks to see my parents & friends, and to attend some meetings involving an animation project that I’ve been working on. As always, I took my camera out with me, but due to some pretty epic man-flu type symptoms, I didn’t manage to head on out into the mountains as much as I’d like.

Instead, I decided to experiment a bit with taking panoramas, which was great fun – as I’m getting a little bit tired of my normal panorama swoop. I headed on up into the Nantlle Valley, and came to Cwm Blwch y Moch, just North of Llyn y Dywarchen, which is nested just under Mynydd Mawr. This time, I tried to focus on a nice feature in the Cwm, as opposed to just a massive panorama sweeping across the landscape. I really enjoyed trying to capture the mood of the place.

For the first image, ‘Y Garn’ – I played around with the fisheye lens, and also graded the image, slightly de-saturating it, to try and bring out the feeling of the day a bit better.

June 9, 2011April 5, 2012

Llyn Nantlle, an epic panorama

Hello. Over May, I headed back to Wales, as I was attending a very good Programme about Freelancing, down in Aberystwyth. It was good to spend nearly the whole month back home, as I got to do a lot of things that I wanted to do, and meet up with some good people.

One evening, after a pretty awesome storm, the sun came out, and lit up the dark clouds so beautifully, I just had to go out and try and shoot one of my favourite spots, Llyn Nantlle. The panorama is my biggest yet. 16 photographs make up this beast, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

The view is quite beautiful, as on your right, you’ve got (Grib) Nantlle Ridge, and on the left, you’ve got one of my favourite mountains – Mynydd Mawr, and in between the two, in the centre, you’ve got Snowdon peaking through the gap.

The site is mentioned in the Old Welsh Manuscripts, Y Mabinogion – as Gwydion searches for Lleu Llaw Gyffes see here.

A painting of the same view was done by the Welsh Landscape painter, who I studied a lot in school, Richard Wilson in the 18th century titled ‘Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle’ which is on display at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, which I’ve always like:

Richard Wilson's 'Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle'

Edit: I seem to be getting a lot of traffic to this post from people looking for the Richard Wilson photo above – please check out the new Google Art Project image, where you can zoom in to reveal so many awesome detail about this painting here – Google Art ‘Snowdon from Llyn Nantlle‘

October 15, 2010November 20, 2011

Mynydd Mawr Project (test video)

Hello.

Here’s a very short video clip I’ve created, of a test footage on my project that I’ve been planning now for a few months.

In it, I try to combine my hobbies, Mountains, Photography and Animation. I think the test came out ok. There’s a few mistakes in it, that I can clearly see, such as the quick zoom in about half way through the video, and other minor stuff, but overall I’m quite happy with it.

The project will take a long time to complete I imagine. I’m going to keep it a secret until I finish it, but it’s nice to see that the test came out as I kinda imagined.

For this, I pointed my camera towards Mynydd Mawr, located the centre marker at the summit, and took a photo. All the settings were on automatic (P) – so that needs to be adjusted for my next run. I then paced out 10m, and shot the next photo. This was done all through the ridge from Trum y Ddysgl towards Y Garn on Nantlle Ridge, about 1km: