Llyn Peninsula North Wales and the Fuji G617

A few weekends back Vicki and I traveled to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales. It is located as circled on the map below.

It is a beautiful place with beaches, spectacular cliffs and the Snowdonia mountains as a backdrop. We only stayed a couple of days but the weather was fantastic and we fell in love with the area and the warm Welsh people we met.

I brought along the Fuji G617 and hoped to get some nice landscape photos. I also brought along my recently purchased soft graduated neutral gradient filter. I bought a cheap version of the Cokin filter (100x150mm) and holder. I was concerned about possible vignetting or interference of the filter holder on the edges of the image. The holder can keep multiple filters with extra slots. I removed these extra slots in an effort reduce the chance these would interfere with the edges of the image.

All of these photos can be seen here in full resolution. This blog format does not show them off in the best way.

I started out with just the center filter and shot the first two photos on a roll (4 photos) of Kodak Portra 800 film. This is great film for handheld photos. I have printed as large as 20" on the long dimension with good results despite the speed and grain. The first photo is at Whistling Sands on the north coast. A beautiful bay and sandy beach with lots of people enjoying the day out.

Whistling Sands (Kodak Portra 800 with center filter)

The next day we went to Porth Meudwy near Aberdaron. This is the port where the ferry runs between Bawdsey Island and the mainland. We considered taking the trip out but there was a heavy off-shore fog bank and we thought the risk was too great of not being able to see much on the fog-bound island. Instead we opted to hike the coastal path. This first photo was from the beach where the boat launches from. You can see the fog is still present. I wasn't sure how this shot would turn out but I really like it. The transition to thicker fog seems perfect to me. A good balance of detail and murkiness and the colour shines through. 

Porth Meudwy (Kodak Porta 800  with center filter)

The next shot is from on top of the headlands. The fog has cleared further and revealed more. Here is when I removed the center filter.

Headlands above Porth Meudwy (Kodak Portra 800  without center filter)

Further on the walk and one can make the mountain tops across the bay

Emerging mountain tops. (Kodak Portra 800 without center filter)

For the next roll I moved to Portra 400 (who needs all that speed on a day like today!). I also decided to play with the graduated neutral density (GND) filter. This filter is a soft transition gradient and offers 2 stops of neutral density. Alex Burke has a great blog article on GND filters, one of the best and clearest I have read. The difficulty with using GNDs on the Fuji G617 as with all non-SLR cameras is judging the position of the transition on the image. There are some suggestions in G617 articles using ground glass and marking the filter, but I went with judging it by looking at the filter position on the lens in relation to my planned composition.

Another difficulty of this camera and the Cokin style rectangular filters is the 'roll cage' of the G617 allows only one orientation of the filter holder. One cannot use the rectangular filter with camera in portrait mode for instance. This does not bother me much as the G617 is a landscape camera after all and I have not been able to find a really good portrait subject (yet!).

 I was concerned about possible interference of the filter holder on the edges of the image so I removed the center filter. This was done on the advice on some forums that many times it is not necessary. Unfortunately this is not true. The photos below are a case in point. One can easily see the darker corners/left right edges as a result of removing the center filter. This is with color negative film with lots of dynamic range and I can only assume would be worse with transparency film like Velvia. I can believe that the vignetting is not as noticeable for photos that don't include the sky where the effect is more noticeable I think.

This was too bad as the center filter costs me a stop of film speed. C'est la vie, I don't think I will remove it again. My next time out will be the try the GND with the center filter and look for the filter holder interference in the image.

 (Kodak Portra  400)

 (Kodak Porta 400)

 (Kodak Portra 400)

The next roll of film was Kodak Ektar 100. I have had a difficult time with this film in the past. I find it difficult to get a realistic color rendition on the scanner or at least one I like. I often got a robins egg blue sky but this has improved markedly with the purchase of ColorPerfect and their ColorNeg plugin for Photoshop. Again though there is the pesky vignetting from the missing center filter.

The first two photos below I wanted to see the effect of the GND. The first photo is with the GND in place. These two photos were processed identically and only had the color saturated. The effect of the GND is clear with a darker sky. The section of land on the left of the image darkens significantly as well. The lack of center filter dominates these image however though the GND does diminish the central brightness.

Test with GND  (Kodak Ektar 100)

Test without GND  (Kodak Ektar 100)

The next photo works well with the GND as the sky and horizon are uniform.

 (Kodak Ektar 100 with GND)

Looking back at the headlands (Kodak Ektar 100)

Finally one other thing is apparent in the images without a center filter. In most cases the left side of the image is darker. I find if I look at thumbnails of photos corner vignetting is more pronounced. I am not sure if this a result of the smaller image size making it more apparent or the scaling process used to shrink the image. Below I have included a screenshot of thumbnails.In most of these there is more than corner vignetting going on with a dark band on the left side of the image. The lower right shows the opposite and so it seems correlated with the darker land image in the end of the image which may just trick the eye into seeing a band.