A while back I posted some pictures of a trip to the Western edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park. The Carmarthen Fans provide a good day out and it’s an easily doable trip from Pembrokeshire that gives a little more interest and altitude than our local Preseli Hills can provide (not that I don’t love them). For some reason the other day it occurred to me that I should revisit these shots and that they might look good in black and white. It’s a useful lesson for photographers to always shoot in RAW and to keep hold of files despite the temptation to clear out images you feel you won’t need again. Storage in the form of external hard drives aren’t too expensive these days and a useful resource when your everyday machine starts to fill up and slow down. The more you use Lightroom or Photoshop the better you become at processing and also, the longer you are a photographer for, the better your eye becomes at picking out good ones. This can be because you better understand the potential of an image post processing or it can be the increased ability of the eye to pick out those elements that make a good photo. You might need to have a second look and then crop down the image before a eureka moment tells you it’s a good one. Also, it’s interesting to look at the settings you were using at the time. Despite thinking I knew what I was doing back in January 2017, I can’t believe that despite howling winds that could potentially cause camera shake and soft images, I was shooting some of these at a relatively slow shutter speed when I could easily have boosted the ISO and shot a faster speed.
I remember that I was really pleased when I found the interesting little ice formation in one of the shots below. At the time, when I got home I didn’t feel I’d got a good shot of it but looking back, processing it differently and making the most of the feature through better cropping, I’m really pleased with it and relieved I didn’t consign it to the recycling bin. Let me know what you think in the comments section.
