Path, Colours and Windmill at Parys Mountain

This is a view featuring one of the many paths at the very picturesque and colourful Parys Mountain, near Amlwch, Anglesey.

The image was captured at 3pm on the 2nd June 2022 as a single RAW file and developed with On1 Photo RAW.

It was a very bright but hazy day, and the light was very diffused with low contrast and no shadows. So I decided, that for most of my shots, I would need just one exposure-optimised RAW file and that there was no need for bracketed HDR sets.

Another approach I had decided upon, was that I was going to use longer focal lengths for my shots here in order to isolate subjects and compositional elements.

My usual approach with landscapes is to get in close with my ultra-wide-angle lens and capitalise on the perspective expansion to emphasise foreground, mid-ground and background. But, having used this approach on previous visits, I realised that it mostly doesn’t work here.

Telephoto Landscapes?

Over the winter of 2021-22, I spent time studying how some photographers use longer focal lengths in their landscape images, and something started to make sense.

Longer focal lengths / narrower fields of view allow for compositional exclusion and further to abstraction.

I knew this inside-out, of course, having taught photography for so long. But I hadn’t thought to pursue exclusion and abstraction to this extent in landscapes, dispensing with close foreground and the depth it gave to an image.

I am now experimenting more with exclusion and abstraction. Compression is also a byproduct of longer lenses, which can help to feature distant subjects more prominently in the composition.

This image was shot at 37mm APS-C (55mm equivalent field of view to 35mm format), and while not quite telephoto, it’s miles away from my usual 10-14mm.

Exclusion and a little compression has worked well for this image I think.

Comments welcome below: