If you want to see a larger image of any of these pictures, please click on the picture.
The Menai Bridge was built by Thomas Telford and was completed in 1826. This suspension bridge connecting the Welsh mainland onto Anglesea is one of two bridges built during the 19th Century. The other is the slightly more recent and considerably less photogenic Britannia Bridge, built by Robert Stephenson, which was opened in 1850. You can read more about these two bridges here. It is a fascinating tale of how 19th Century engineering has been modified over the years and is still working in the 21st Century.
I have undoubtedly put up far too many pictures of this beautiful bridge, but I couldn't leave any of these out!
I've started the page with some general views of the bridge. The two on the left were taken during daylight, while the one on the right was taken quite late during dusk. It was given a long exposure and then I got the computer to give it a watercolour treatment.
These three pictures illustrate how the water gradually loses its blue colour during the sunset. (I was facing north east when taking these pictures, so the sunset was behind me and to my left.) The right of these three pictures is the only one on this page not to feature the bridge. I took it because of the sunset colour being reflected off the hills.
I continued shooting pictures as dusk approached. The picture on the right may have had a bit of a tweak on the computer, but there was definitely colour in the water when I took that picture!
It sometimes happens that just as the sun sets, blue becomes the strongest colour, and that's what's happened here.
As I went on taking pictures, it got gradually darker, and the lights on the bridge began to show up and to increasingly dominate the pictures.
I stopped taking pictures when there was still a little colour in the sky, but the surroundings of the bridge were mainly reduced to shadows. I'm very pleased with my final efforts, though, particularly considering the trouble I had persuading my film scanner not to extrapolate the light bits into the dark bits!
To finish off, here's something a bit different: this is the picture from the top right of this page, but turned into a monochrome image.
More pictures from our summer holiday: Llyn Tegid The lake at Bala, complete with narrow gauge railway
