afternoon lakes scenes
Learn how to capture the best possible compositions and exposures outdoors
Correct colours
Continuing to climb the stone path, we reached the picture perfect Llyn Idwal. Auto White Balance (AWB) is fine in most situations, but your Canon DSLR doesn’t always get it 100% right. To ensure our colours are accurate, we set our White Balance setting according to the weather – a mixture of the Daylight and Cloudy settings for our shoot. Adjust your White Balance to a specific setting and each sequence of the photos will have a consistent colour ‘temperature’, so you’ll spend less time in Photoshop warming up or cooling down images later on.
Do go chasing waterfalls
On the way down from Llyn Idwal, we couldn’t resist a slowed-down shot of this rocky waterfall, with a distant mountain peak in our background. Shooting vertically, we again used a 10-stop ND filter (with correct Custom White Balance setting) to extend our exposure from 1/30 sec to 8 secs, and turn the rushing waters into milky blur. This has also captured movement in the clouds too, which is nice.
Blowing a gale = long exposure time
Did we mention it was windy as hell while we were shooting? As the clouds were moving quickly and the small Llyn Idwal lake actually had white tipped waves, we decided to capture all this movement with a long exposure. As it was still daylight, we needed to use a 10-stop ND filter to extend our exposures and to blur the fast-moving clouds and waters: from 1/5 sec at f/22 to 5 secs at f/11. To keep your camera still, we dug our tripod legs into soft ground, and again hung our bag off it underneath, for an extra sturdy stance.
Set a Custom White Balance when using budget ND filters to obtain the correct colour temperature