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A couple of hundred years ago, my home town, Swansea, was the home of the world’s busiest port right at the epicentre of the global trade in copper.

The bay has a huge tidal range so massive ships were able to navigate to the docks there, right at the point where the River Tawe entered the sea.

Travel 30 miles or so north, up the Swansea Valley to a narrow unclassified road that runs along the valley’s side and you can look up the mountain to the place where the river first burbles out of the rock there before widening into a stream and cascading down the mountainside.

I wanted to capture an image of one of these cascades and, being unable to actually walk up the mountain, chose one right at the roadside.  But it’s no less dramatic than one further up the mountain and is one of my favourite spots to sit and contemplate life in general.

I used a polarising filter to reduce the glare off the water and slightly increase the exposure time to give a sense of movement in the scene.  I also had to shoot two images (one on the close foreground, the other on the cascade) and stacked them in Photoshop later to ensure front to back sharpness in my image.

Fujifilm GFX50R, Fujinon GF 23mm f4

1/3 of a second at f16, ISO 100

Tripod, self-timer release