Stuart’s Photography

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.

The start of something a bit different, this week. When I’m out photographing the (normally historic) subjects and routes for my Merthyr Road project, I’m always coming across sights that appeal to me as a photographer, but which don’t really fit in all that well with the photos I choose for the final article published here on my blog. Rather than lose these photos, I’ve decided to give each shot its very own article.

First up is this shot of Robert Price Timber and Roofing in Taffs Well. Their timber yard is bounded on the east by the A470 trunk road, and on the south by the former Rhymney Valley Railway line from Walnut Tree Junction (the line now forms part of the Taff Trail cycle route).

Something (maybe a tramroad or railway) used to run north to south through the ground where their yard now stands. There’s a surviving bridge that the former Rhymney Valley Railway line crosses on the south side of the timber yard, and hunting through the trees to the north of the timber yard, there’s the remains of something that looks like it could have been a bridge support.
UPDATE: the something is the remains of the Cardiff Railway route from Tongwynlais to Rhydefelin Halt.