It was only a few miles from our rented cottage through the bruised Snowdonia dawn, dark blue mountain shapes rising up on either side of the quiet road, cloaking and concealing us from the world. Wiping the sleep from my eyes, all I really wanted was my duvet and more coffee. The streetlights of Llanberis lay somewhere up the road ahead. On the car radio, a news bulletin announced that the mysterious super virus from the far east was spreading further towards us. Apparently a British man aboard a cruise ship in Japan had tested positive. In those uncertain days of February 2020, how little we knew how quickly things would change beyond all recognition - how quickly we’d all be living with it. It’s not often I’m persuaded from my slumbers this early, but all the research had told us our subject needed a morning visit. At least this was February, and sunrise wouldn’t be happening at too unreasonable an hour. What was rather more worrying was just how much something that was spreading from the west was going to affect proceedings. Something wet and very windy that went by the name of Ciara - the third named storm of the winter. And if the forecasters were right, Ciara was due to be the biggest and the baddest so far.
The large untidy parking area was more or less empty. Just a couple of vans that looked as if they might have been here all night peered back at us out of the gloom as we pulled up. All was quiet, save for a series of invisible gusts that chased urgent ripples across the lake. It wasn’t difficult to find the tree - yes that tree - the one everyone comes here to photograph. There was rather less water around the base than I’d been hoping for, but we were here for one morning only. Nearby, watching with interest was a young man from Liverpool. After we’d tackled the most important question asked of all Liverpudlians, i.e. was he from the red half or the blue (he was a red), he told us he was a climber, here for the weekend to race up the sides of slopes that mere hikers would be bewildered by. Tall, strong and rangy, everything that I’m not, he looked like a climber. I’ve tried climbing, only to be told by my son that I look like a potato stuck to a wall. I fear he's right. Liverpool was only ninety minutes away, and this young adventurer could come here as easily and as quickly as we go to Dartmoor. Also with us were two more photographers, who arrived after Dave and Lee had already given up and headed back to the car. You wouldn’t want to be competing with too many more bodies to line up your sunrise here.
Getting a shot wasn’t easy - especially not easy when you’re trying for a long exposure. Of course you can do a long exposure on the water and a fast one on the sky and blend them. Unless you’re trying to blur the sky too, it’s one of the easier compositions to do this with. I did try that in fact, but only in landscape format, and it was long before I finally began to get to grips with the principles of layers and masks. Mostly we were dealing with strong gusts rather than a sustained wind, but each time the branches calmed down again, another blast flew through and disrupted them again. If I was going to get anything at all, I was going to need to be patient. And as the sun started to light up the mountain pass at the far end of Llyn Padarn, timing was going to be crucial too - especially for someone who hadn’t got very far with blending just yet.
Too many attempts at long exposures later, I gave up and joined the others. The sun had risen, and I might or might not have got a shot. From here we headed into the Ogwen Valley and forgot about the tree. Twenty-four hours later, it wouldn’t be just the branches bristling gently in the breeze. Throughout the day the winds gathered pace, and night time brought a growing crescendo that lifted our recycling bins from the front porch of our temporary billet and spread them extravagantly across the lane. I’m surprised the tree was still there.
And that was it really. As far as I was concerned, my attempts to photograph the lone tree of Llyn Padarn had turned into a non event, all because I’d allowed myself to become too preoccupied with long exposures. In every shot, the water had the textures I wanted, but the branches were all over the place, blurred to the point of extinction in the upper twigs. The stormy February adventure had delivered plenty of easier shots to tinker with, and the contents of the folder from the lakeside sunrise never found their way into the editing suite.
But since then, two things have happened. And while the first stems from a very slow and gradual increase in my competence levels in Photoshop, the other is a result of a rather more recent change in tastes. It’s only over the last few months that I haven’t been reaching for the ND filters for almost every shot I take. While there are still plenty of instances in which I want to drag the water out with longer exposures, there are scenes such as this where “normal conditions” work very nicely for me. And while it’s not a particularly distinguished shot of a tree that’s been photographed by just about every tog who ever set foot in North Wales, many of them in far more exciting conditions, I’m just glad that I was able to return to that collection of unloved raw files and fashion something from the confusion. Polishing the proverbial perhaps, but there you go. It’s not exactly on the doorstep you know.