Into the night

What a day! Spurred on by yesterday's activities, and after checking the weather forecast, I enthusiastically got up at 4:15am and headed back to the Brecon Beacons with the intention of capturing sunrise over the snow covered hills. 

The Met Office website confidently stated there would be wall to wall sunshine, clear skies and also fog around sunrise. I had hopes of seeing a cloud inversion too as the conditions seemed ideal so off I went! 

I arrived at 5:45 and set off in the dark, under the stars, and then started to realise my timing may have been unnecessarily early. I had planned to get to the top an hour before sunrise to find a good spot and set up the tripod etc and then bask in golden hour goodness. However on the way up I could see the top was covered in cloud and after yesterday's trip into a white out I didn't fancy doing it in the dark, especially as I wanted a good shot for my efforts. Of course this didn't really matter as the cloud came down to meet me instead! Slap in the middle of a cloud, up a mountain, at 6:30am, in the dark. Nailed it! Hopes of award winning dramatic sunrise shot thwarted.

So here I am, half way up Pen Y Fan, trying to get a shot that at lest conveys the situation. At this point I was still relatively warm so hung around and waited for a break in the cloud/ sun rise, and took pictures of myself standing around with a torch on my head! After a while it got light and there were a few small breaks in the cloud, but since the summit was still covered I headed down around 9:00. Then obviously as I was nearing the half way down point, the cloud disappeared so I went back up and it turned into an amazing day! Hurrah for perseverance:)

I ended up with quite a few nice shots but chose this one as it is what I will remember the day most for, plus I'm too knackered to do any editing!

(Just for the record I haven't stuck a dodgy vignette on this, the faint circle around me is my head torch lighting up the cloud. At least I think it is, it could be my massive aura)