Reflecting On A Sunrise

On the edge of the Snowdonia National Park sits Llyn Nantlle Uchaf. A magical little lake with uninterrupted views across its waters to the peak of Snowdon.

In theory, the location should be perfect to capture a stunning image. The sun rises perfectly behind the mountain range and a group of small rowing boats makes for some fantastic foreground interest.

Three times I’d visited and only once managed to capture an image I was fairly happy with.

So I started the week making all the usual plans. Checking the forecast, looking at the cloud cover, looking up the sunrise times, planning the journey.

To bed early. Alarm set.

Wake up to this….

So, I had to reschedule for the following day…

What a difference!

Clear sky, zero wind, perfect reflections and atmospheric mist drifting across the lake.

Just a short walk had me right on the shoreline framing up the image. Initially I planned to capture the more obvious horizontal landscape composition but with the shape of the boats in the foreground and the added bonus of the Moon and Venus in the top right hand corner, a vertical composition is the one I eventually decided I liked the best. A close second is the 1:1 square cropped image shown below.