Spirited Away. 千と千尋の神隠し

Good morning :)

Another camera rotation photograph from me today and one that was taken up a cold and windy mountain in Wales a few years ago whilst hanging out with some other Lightpainters for an epic weekend.

Whilst Tim and a few others were playing around near the ruined barracks on the lower slopes, myself, Dan and a couple of others found this iron brigade we decided to use in our photographs.

Eldir Fawr (I think is the correct name) for the Electric Mountain is a mountain right by Mount Snowdon in Wales.

Named after the slate industry had pretty much hollowed out a giant hole in the side of it and the demand for slate subsided, the mountain was the put to use as a hydro electric power generator, housing a generator in the mountain at the bottom and feeding the turbines via gravity dropped water from a repository lake at the top.

The actual electricity produced is to enable the national grid in the uk to cope with peak time demand (tv breaks etc when the kettles get switched on for a brew)

It actually takes more electricity than produced by the mountain to pump the water back up to the top again......it’s madness I tell you, madness !!

Anyway I digress sorry :)

After setting up Dan standing on the bridge and getting focus on him, I then went behind him and backlit him with a red gelled flash I then fired off, I returned to the camera and turned it 180 degrees and back lit Dan again, this is quite a simple shot for me as it only involved one tripod, one lens and a single light source.

It’s almost like taking a light-painting holiday when the set up and execution is so simple and it was nice to really enjoy the views and the location to it fullest.

For some reason this photograph reminded me of the Manga film ‘Spirited Away’

I guess it’s the clouds from the top of the frame that interact with the rotation to give movement to the lower half’s and add a white element to the colour pallet, and the red light on the foliage that looks like red cherry blossom, tenuous probably but it did remind me of that.

What I also liked is you can see the town way below twinkling away in the distance, which really added to show how far up we were.

It’s a beautiful part of the world, and well worth checking out if your in the area.

This is a single exposure photography taken in one continuous exposure, raw conversion to jpeg was in camera and no Lightroom or Photoshop used.

Settings used:

F5.6
Iso 400
80 seconds
13mm

Have a great day and I’ll catch you tomorrow :)

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