Following the relative disappointment of the steam covered scenes I photographed earlier, I found my hotel, rested up after a long drive and reviewed my photos from Hafodynyrys, Penallta and the steelworks, then went for something to eat. As I ate my tea, I glanced outside and noticed that the sky had cleared, the sun was setting and the sky was turning that blue colour you get at dusk. Knowing that it wouldn’t last for long, I paid up, got my camera and drove the ten minutes or so to the steelworks site.

Fortune was on my side – there was no traffic, I managed to park off the roundabout opposite the site entrance (it had been filled with cars earlier) and I hurried over the road to the spot I had photographed from earlier. The steam wasn’t as bad, and with the sky turning a deeper blue, I turned up the ISO and took a number of different compositions. I did have my tripod in the car, but there were a number of police officers present due to their being a demonstration earlier, and I’d already been asked what I was doing and warned not to go past the factory gate. Tripods are a superb way of getting unwanted attention so I stuck with ISO6400 and image stabilisation to get these photographs. I’m quite pleased with them and have kept them in colour despite most of my output being in black and white.

When I got home and viewed them in Lightroom, I opened up the shadows a bit and noticed that perhaps unsurprisingly there was quite a bit of noise. It wasn’t too noticeable – that’s one of the benefits of a 40MP sensor, you’ve got to zoom in a lot – but I decided to give Lightroom’s new-ish denoise filter a go. The results were outstanding, the photos now look like they’ve been taken at more like ISO1600, without any noticeable impact on detail, which is quite remarkable.

Of course, you can’t see the effect on these photographs as they’re only 1200 pixels wide rather than the original 8256, and I’m not going to post the full size originals as they’re just too big. However, here’s a screen shot from the original (with the opened up shadows, thus revealing the noise) and the denoised version.