Stuart’s Photography

If you can get out of bed early enough, this time of year offers fantastic light when the weather isn’t against you. And yet, look at the photography going on this time of year, and you’ll see that so few people ever look up to see – and photograph – what’s above them.

Mind you, you have to look up a long way to see this bad boy. This is one of the ridiculously tall lights that rises up from the Treforrest / Glyntaff turnoff to look down onto the elevated section of the A470. To have any chance at all of capturing this shot, I had to wander into the car park of the new University of Glamorgan campus (many thanks to the security team for their permission), and even from that elevated position I had a fair job getting the whole lamp into the shot.

Can you imagine having the job of changing the bulbs in this thing when they blow?

Back in June, I took part in the annual Photomarathon for the first time. It was definitely weird using a chemical camera for the first time in six years! Like many of the competitors, I also had my digital equipment with me, and I’m really glad I did, because as the sun was setting I was wandering past Cardiff Bay’s run-down railway station, and was able to snag this shot.

This station sits at the southern-most end of the oldest surviving railway line in South Wales – the Taff Vale Railway (TVR). Sadly I haven’t been able to find any photos online of what this station looked like when the docks were in full swing, but books such as the Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canal do have some photos on the printed page if you’d like to compare.

This is the very first HDR shot I’ve processed since being forced to upgrade from PhotoMatix Pro v2 to v3. I’ve used v2 for all of my HDR work to date, but sadly it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Still, first impressions of v3 are very encouraging!

Pontypridd stands on the banks of the River Taff and the River Rhondda as the gateway to the valleys beyond – and the mineral and coal riches that were exploited between the late 1700’s and the 1980’s. From its first bridge in 1750, built to allow travel to market without crossing a deadly river ford, via what is possibly the world’s oldest surviving railway bridge, to the modern road bridges of today, it has always been necessary to bridge the rivers at Pontypridd in order to get from A to B.

Thoughts On The Day

I was taking a week off between jobs to get my annoyance with my former boss’s behaviour out of my system, and it was a real relief to get out and about with the camera. The weather was lovely, and what could be better than a walk through Pontypridd taking shots of the different bridges that have sprung up in this market town?

I’m always surprised at how Pontypridd has failed to capitalise on Cardiff’s growth. Why hasn’t it become a booming commuter town for everyone who can’t afford the house prices down in Cardiff itself? Sitting at the very northern end of the Taff Vale, the old TVR railway splits north of Ponty to take travellers up the Rhondda Valley to Treherbert, up the Cynon Valley to Aberdare, and up the Taff Valley to Merthyr Tydfil. That gives Ponty three times the amount of trains passing through each day.

Today, Pontypridd feels more important to the folks who travel down from those valleys than anyone else, marking as it does the half-way point in the journey from the tops of the valleys down to Cardiff. I guess the history of its bridges shows that Pontypridd has always been a place people travel through rather than a destination in its own right.

Favourite Photo From The Shoot

It wasn’t easy to pick just one photo from this group, but this is the one that I like the most. I just think it does a great job of showing off a very beautiful bridge

The Photos

Here are all of the photos from this photo shoot. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Post Production

This set of photos marks the start of the next evolution in my photographic style. I’ve been using HDR for several months now, but this time I was determined to put together a workflow that brings the HDR images closer in initial appearance to regular, single-frame photos. Before HDR, my favourite style had been the slightly desaturated look of the Taff Vale Eastern Ridge Walk set. What I wanted was that look, but with the added detail that HDR brings. Too many HDR photos just lack a certain subtlety – as do too many single exposure shots, it has to be said!

Since taking these photos a year ago now, I’ve refined the HDR workflow over and over before finally coming back to these photos and re-processing them for publication at last. I promise that I’ll do a full article on the workflow in the near future, but the main points are to avoid over-saturating the original HDR image, and then using Aperture 2’s new Saturation and Definition tools to bring out the best of the HDR detail whilst toning down its exuberance at the same time.

Sadly, I’ve been too short of time to thoroughly research each of the bridges in this set. There’s also one bridge missing – Brunel’s bridge that carries the Taff Vale Railway north from Pontypridd station over the River Rhondda towards Abercynon. I only noticed that whilst doing the write-up. Doh!

Last summer, I hiked up the Little Garth to take some shots of the remains of Walnut Junction Viaduct. It’s normally a very easy walk (provided the ground is dry!), but this time the rains had brought more than just mud down onto the path … just don’t tell the missus that I scrambled over this thing both on the way up and on the way down

View all the photos taken at Dawn on Caerphilly Mountain as part of my Merthyr Road project on Flickr.

It was the first night of clear skies after an unusually warm week – perfect conditions for a sunrise shoot. With the Taff Gap and Taff Vale filled with fog, the best place to enjoy the dawn was up on nearby Caerphilly Mountain.

Thoughts On The Day

Looking at the pictures I took, I’m pretty pleased with the results, but all I could think about that morning was just how sick I felt. I’ve been unwell all week, and my mind was definitely not on the job as we headed up to the summit of Caerphilly Mountain having forgotten the tripod in the boot of the car – or the tripod quick-release head left back in the house!

But wow – what a view from the top of Caerphilly Mountain.

In days of old, standing on top of the mountain, I imagine the view would have included the steam rising from the trains making their way from Walnut Tree Junction up Nantgarw along the Rhymney Railway. The trains would also have been coming up from Nantgarw along the Pontypridd, Caerphilly and Newport Railway, crossing Caerphilly on their way via Machen to the docks at Newport.

Industry still dominates at Nantgarw, but steam has given way to the jet turbines of the General Electric factory. The fog was creeping up from Nantgarw, cloaking the General Electric factory in the most spectacular way. The next time you wake up in Pontypridd, Trefforest or any of the Taff Vale villages, take a look outside to see if it’s foggy. If it is, head on up to the top of Caerphilly Mountain – you’ll be in for quite the treat.
Photos From The Shoot

Click on any of the individual photos to see a larger version.

Post Production

After the successful trip to Scotland this summer, it’s become clear that my audience has a strong preference for photos that are rich in colour. HDR is a great technique to use at dawn and dusk to squeeze the maximum amount of colour out of a DSLR without ending up with photos that are over-saturated. Just remember to take a tripod! You can take handheld HDR shots if your technique is good enough and your camera body can shoot fast enough, but you’ll always get much better results if the camera is in exactly the same position for each frame for your HDR masterpiece.