Curve Card Review. All your cards in one and a real travel money saver
If you are reading this you likely already know what Curve is, but I’ll give it a brief intro just in case you aren’t sure what exactly the Curve card is. The Curve card is a card that allows you to use almost any card from your wallet but carry just the Curve card with you. You can connect your credit and debit cards to your Curve app and then select which card you would like to use. When you use the Curve card in a store or online the card you selected in the app will be billed.
I’ve been using Curve since the BETA stage and have come to use it daily for both business and personal expenses. After a few years of use, I thought I’d do a review of my experiences with Curve.
The perfect card for Worldwide use
I’ll begin with what I love about Curve. I used to carry around 4 cards, 2 for personal and 2 for business. Curve was inviting as you only have to remember one pin number, although to me I only really used 2 of the 4 cards on a regular basis. And remembering pins wasn’t usually an issue. So where did Curve have its benefits for me? I spend a lot of time away from the UK and my bank charges stupid foreign exchange rates, Curve charges just 1% per transacting and has a flat £2 fee plus 1% for cash withdrawals while abroad. Although it’s not free to use abroad, unless you have a good travel credit card it will likely save you a load of money if you are out of the UK enough.
Curve does have a few drawbacks while abroad. You likely won’t have data on your mobile or often won’t be able to get a good connection as I find. In this case, you can’t switch your payment card in the Curve app so any transactions you make will be billed to the last card you used in Curve. This is no longer much of a problem as Curve introduced a feature that allows you to change the card that was used for a transaction within 14 days of making it. This is a truly awesome feature that saves a lot of admin work if you bill a lot of business purchases on a personal card by accident or vice versa.
Withdraw cash using a credit card and avoid any fees!
The other thing I love about Curve is the ability to withdraw cash using a credit card. Most credit cards will have a fee for withdrawing cash and will also charge interest immediately. With Curve, you can withdraw cash and it will show on the credit card as any other transaction would. If you have a credit card that doesn’t charge for foreign transactions then you can switch the currency of your card in Curve to withdraw cash in a local currency and avoid all fees. This currently only applies to Curves supported currencies so if you are in a country that doesn’t have a supported currency you will get charged the standard rate by Curve. Curve also has other benefits while abroad such as safety. You don’t have to carry your debit card with you at all so the worry of card cloning isn’t so much of a worry. I tend to just carry my Curve card, Amex and another Mastercard. This serves me well both in the UK and anywhere else. I can withdraw from any debit card that is on my Curve app and I also have a backup card if needed.
No American Express support... yet
My biggest issue with Curve is the lack of Amex support. In the early days of Curve they supported Amex and some would say this is what gave Curve some serious attention. The ability to use your Amex anywhere a Mastercard is accepted. In the UK where Amex isn’t accepted in many places, this was a game changer. Plus getting to use your Amex abroad without the high FX fees. However, Curve no longer supports Amex so you will have to use your Amex outside of Curve.
When it comes to business Curve has as much value when making online payments for services, etc. Most of my business expenses are in USD which incurs a lot of bank charges, Curve drastically reduces these fees as we get charged the flat 1% fee on all FX transactions.
The Curve App
Curves app is very good, it has come a long way since I first started using it. Given you have a connection you can instantly switch between cards and you also get instant notifications when your card is used. This tends to be more efficient in the UK that say 3rd world countries where the notification doesn’t come through until a few days later. The payment notifications are very useful as they offer a nice security insight should your card ever fall into the wrong hands. You would know if someone was using it can you can lock the card from your app instantly.
I have a few concerns with Curve such as what would happen if I lost my phone. I’ve used the Curve support a few times and on all occasions, they were very fast to answer questions and always very helpful. Touch wood, I’ve yet to require their support with a fraud claim. It is worth noting that you will lose any cover that your credit card offers if you use it through your Curve card so that is worth considering when making payments.
What I like about Curve
- The ability to use all my cards (Except Amex) but only carry one.
- Curves App, the app is very useful for locking the card and checking transactions on the go.
- You don't have to inform your bank or Curve when you travel.
- FX fees. At just 1% per transaction in foreign currencies, it is likely cheaper than your bank or credit card when using it abroad.
- Easily change a previous transaction from one card to another.
- Security. Not having to carry debit cards with me always feels safer.
- The relatively early rewards system looks like it may become more powerful in the future.
What I dislike about Curve
- They have a lot of data. All the card details you add and also the transactions you make with Curve.
- Not sure what happens if I lose my phone. How can I change my Curve cards?
- FX fees. I have a Curve Black card, I would hope that in the future that the premium card comes with Zero FX fees.
- Only a small number of currencies are supported. Meaning you can bill your card in the local currency.
If you travel frequently then Curve is a good choice for you, also if you carry more than 2 cards then Curve will certainly be useful.
Stable WordPress Multisite Cache Configuration
Updated 1st April 2018
One of the biggest problems I found while working with a large WordPress multisite was caching issues. The problems seem to amplify when using domain mapping with the big caching plugin options such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. With good server setup, there isn't a real need for many additional cache plugins that will eat up resources and in some cases actually make your site slower.
What I was looking for was a static cache plugin. A plugin that will generate a static HTML version of your page and serve the static version to visitors. WP Super Cache seemed like the solid option but after 6 months of testing. We found multiple issues on our multisite. These included login redirects for no apparent reason and limited per site options.
I'll go through the setup I use on most Multisite networks. This changes from time to time but provides a solid base to work up from with very little expense.
Cache Enabler By KeyCDN
After a lot of trial and error, we found Cache Enabler by KeyCDN. A very simple caching plugin that generates static HTML copies of posts and pages, what is really great about Cache Enabler is that you can independently configure for each site on your network. It works perfectly with domain mapping and doesn't cause any painful login errors or our users.
Cache enabler has a very simple set of option that you can just leave as are. You can activate network-wide and it will automatically serve a static cache for each subsite, even with domain mapping.
Redis Object Cache
Redis (or Memcached) is pretty vital for a large multisite. You will likely have a lot of users logged in making database requests. This will really slow things down when you combine them with a large number of plugins and traffic. Redis caching database requests and serves them from your servers RAM. The downside is that it uses your servers memory resources, but I'll assume you have a database on a dedicated server so your web server can spare some RAM. You will need to install Redis on your web server and then you can use the WordPress Redis Object Cache plugin.
Autoptimize
Unless you are minifying your scripts serverside or with Cloudflare. You will also want to look at a solution to compress, combine and defer scripts and even inline critical CSS. Autoptimize comes out on top each time we test minification plugins, even compared to WP Rocket Autoptimize often performs best with little configuration. Autoptimize will need to be configured per site in a WordPress multisite network which will give you much more control.
CDN Enabler
If you manage a CDN through KeyCDN or similar then try CDN Enabler also by KeyCDN to activate a content delivery network on a per-site basis. Allowing different CDN URL for each site or going further and improving SEO by giving each site a relative CNAME. Autoptimize allows you to configure a CDN URL but only for minified files so CDN Enabler works better if you also need to serve images and other media over a CSN.
I hope this short article helps other find a stable cache setup for their Multisite. Any questions or comments please leave them below.
How to make a Client Logo Carousel in Divi
Updated 1st April 2018
This guide is considered to be of intermediate difficulty.
In this short guide, I will explain how you can make an image carousel within the Divi theme. This is something that has been missing IMO but also something that is very simple to add using the default WordPress image Gallery and the popular Owl Carousel 2.
Very little to no custom CSS is needed and we can even add our carousel without making a child theme with the help of a few additional plugins.
Yes, there are many carousel plugins available for WordPress but I like to add only what I need to my sites to reduce bloat and keep a reasonable page load time. So rather than installing a plugin we can add a few lines of functions and achieve the same results.
How I Built The Client Logo Carousel in Divi
Step 1
First, you will need to download Owl Carousel. Once you have downloaded your files you can enter the functions below directly to your Divi child theme functions or use the Code Snippet Plugin to add this function to your admin.
We have also used a Google-hosted jQuery rather than our local version, this is optional.
Step 2
Next, we will use a short function to remove any tags from the WordPress gallery output as these can cause problems with our carousel.
Step 3
Add the images you want to use a WordPress Gallery. It doesn't matter how many columns you choose as our function above removes the tags at the end of each row meaning any number of columns will work with the carousel.
If you want your images to link to pages or other sites you can use a plugin such as WP Custom Gallery Links. This is useful if you want to make a logo carousel of clients.
Step 4
In this step we will configure the slider settings, you will need to change the '#gallery-2 id to the id of your gallery. You can get this by inspecting your gallery using a browser web inspector see screenshot below to see:
We have used the basic setting for Owl Carousel here. Please see the documentation for more details of what you can do.
Conclusion
You will need to make some CSS adjustments of your own but with any luck, you should have a functioning Owl Carousel.
How to make a clean client logo gallery with Divi
I created a small logo gallery just above the footer on the CloudCanvas website and a few people have asked how I achieved this and if I used a plugin to make it. So I decided to make a short how-to guide so everyone who has asked can achieve the same effect easily using just Divi and a bit of CSS, no plugins.
If you want to make a Divi Client Logo Carousel then you can follow this guide.
What it looks like
Making the Divi Module
I used a Standard section with 4 columns and image modules to make this work. I'll explain how to make just 4 logos but you can expand on this and add an many as you want.
In the sample screenshots, I'm using a global element but you don't need to save to library as a global element or save to the library at all.
You need to add the class ID: sponsor-logos to the row containing the images.
You don't need to use any custom classes or IDs to the image modules but after we have entered our custom CSS. You may want to tweak the image margins in the advanced section to get them aligned perfectly.
The CSS
To make the images align and also to have the fade effect on hover we need to add a little bit of CSS. You can add this in the theme customizer or in the Divi additional CSS section.
Conclusion
Now you have added the modules and CSS you can adjust your margins and settings to make it perfect on your site. I have included the assets needed including the exported global module that was used on the actual CloudCanvas site. You can download these here.
Share what you have made in the comments below or feel free to ask any questions if you get stuck.
Puerto Galera, Philippines a Rugged Tropical Paradise
Puerto Galera is a hidden gem just a few hours drive from Manila, we decided to drive from Quezon City to Puerto Galera in March in what was planned to be a few days but turned into a week as we fell in love with the rugged tropical paradise on the first day. We stayed in the Bamboo House on Talipanan Beach which is about 30 minutes drive from the main town of Puerto Galera but it's nicely tucked away from the busy beaches and streets. The mountains truly meet the sea at Talipanan Beach, it's an incredibly scenic area that probably only going to be really appreciated if you are willing to get out and explore it.
The first day we set off on the kayak that the hotel provided for free and managed to discover a secluded beach about a mile up the shore, past the main attraction of White Beach. Behind the Bamboo House Hotel is a dense rainforest with a small indigenous village, you can walk through this village upstream to a few small waterfalls, all within an hour walk from Talipanan Beach.
Manila to Puerto Galera by car
Getting from Manila to Puerto Galera by car is pretty straightforward and doesn't take too long, however, you should set off pretty early to give yourself time to enjoy the evening in Puerto Galera. You will need to take a roll-on-roll-off ferry from Batangas to Calapan as the ferry to Puerto Galera is a passenger ferry only (as of March 2017 this was the case anyway), because you have to go to Calapan you will need to add 2 hours at least to your journey from Calapan to Puerto Galera.
The road from Calapan to Puerto Galera is slow and windy but can be quite scenic. Along the road from Calapan to Puerto Galera, you should make time to stop at the Tukuran Falls as you will pass by the road to there on the way to or from Puerto Galera. I will write about Tukuran Falls in a sperate post. You will also pass by the Tamaraw Falls so try and plan your drive during the day, the Tamaraw Falls is just off the road so you can actually see it from the car or you can stop before the bridge and get a better view.
There are various ferries from Batangas to Calapan such as FastCat, we just turned up at the port and managed to get a ferry within the hour. I'd recommend you check that there is a ferry beforehand though as not everyone will be as lucky!
Talipanan Falls
Talipanan Falls is located in the rainforest behind Talipanan Beach, you pass through the Iraya-Mangyan village that is just off the road or the end of the road when I was there. If you stay at the Bamboo House Hotel just ask about Talipanan Falls and they will explain better how to get to there, from the hotel it's about 45 minutes up the forest.
Lonely Planet recommends you get a guide Mangyan guide in the Iraya-Mangyan village, it's up to you whether you do or not but if you follow the path you don't really need one you could just buy something from the village instead to help support them.
If you do the Mt Talipanan hike - which I never got around to doing - you can also hire a guide from the Iraya-Mangyan village to show you the way.
Sunset from an empty beach
After a hike to Talipanan Falls, we headed back to the hotel to pick up the Kayak and then paddled around a cove to watch the sunset from a completely empty beach, a perfect ending to what is one of my favourite destinations in the Philippines.
If you are looking for a quick break from Manila or should you happen to be travelling the Philippines be sure to add Puerto Galera to your itinerary?
Photography from Mt Ulap Philippines
This is the first photography article I've written in a while, I have been working & travelling in the Philippines since February so the change in routine has left me neglecting the photography section of my site. This will be the first of many articles that cover the recent trips I have taken across the Philippines and Indochina over the past 5 months.
Mt Ulap is one the highest peaks in the Philippines standing just over a mile at 1846 meters, it's a pretty impressive peak as it's not part of a huge mountain range and views from the summit span for miles in all directions. You can even see as far as the South China Sea on a clear day, Ulap actually means cloud so you often get coverings of cloud on the summit and on the accent, however the two trips I've taken it was beautifully clear.
Hiking Mt Ulap won't be for everyone, having grown up near the Brecon Beacons in rural Herefordshire where you can go just about anywhere in the countryside and find a footpath that you can stroll for hours without seeing a single person. As I've grown accustomed to this and one of the reasons I love photography and the great outdoors so much is because I can find calm in the isolation of the countryside, I was slightly put off when I found out that you need to have a guide accompany you on the entire hike. It isn't a particularly long hike at around 10 miles and the path is pretty clear the entire way so the need for the guide is somewhat unclear - I guess it helps provide money for locals and hopefully, some of that money goes into protecting the beautiful area. Having a guide wasn't all that bad and on the second visit the guide was full of information and even helped manage the three dogs we decided to bring on the adventure.
The hike is pretty straightforward, no matter how early you arrive, there always seems to be a group already on their way up, I guess that hiking has become as popular in the Philippines as it is in the UK! You can make the entire hike without seeing many other people as most groups end up at a different pace throughout the route there are a few markers along the route to Mt Ulap which include a few other peaks that you can stop at for a rest and some food.
The best time to visit is before sunrise so you can catch the sunrise from a high advantage point, and continue the rest of the hike in relatively cool temperatures. The heat isn't much of an issue as you are going to be at least 1300 meters above sea level along the entire route and even high for most of it, that said the shade is limited along most of the ridges so the sun is pretty intense on a clear day.
Below are a selection of some of the photography from my first visit to Mt Ulap, I will add more images from my second trip soon. Please leave your comments below. For info on how to go to Mt Ulap yourself please see the bottom of the post for details of where to register and go to get started.
Mt Ulap Hike Details
MT. ULAP ECO-TRAIL
Itogon, Benguet (See map above)
Entry point: Brgy. Ampucao, Itogon
Exit point: Brgy. Sta. Fe, Itogon
LLA: 16.2904 N, 120.6312 E, 1846 MASL (Mt. Ulap)
Days required / Hours to summit: 1 day / 2-3 hours
Specs: Difficulty 3/9, Trail class 1-3,
Features: Grassland and pine ridges, scenic views of the Cordilleras, burial caves
Source: www.pinoymountaineer.com
How to Register
To reserve a place you will need to go to the following Facebook Pages and send a message, they limit the number of people going up each day so please register in advance - facebook.com/mtUlap
How to fix Google Webmasters 404 crawl errors within WordPress
404 errors are often overlooked and can lead to a poor user experience and even negatively affect your SEO attempts. Many people tend to delete old posts and pages from WordPress without setting up a redirect, leaving a URL in Google that will lead to a 'Page Note Found' (404) error.
Typically you would need to add a rule to your htaccess file to fix these errors and redirect your URL to a functioning page, however, you can easily fix these errors within the WordPress dashboard using a free plugin called Redirection. First, you will need to find the errors, (I will assume you have already added your site to Google Webmasters) in Google Webmasters open your site and then go to Crawl Errors. If you have just a few errors you can copy and paste the URL.
Now you can go to your WordPress site and install the Redirection Plugin, once active you can go to Tools > Redirection within the WP admin. In our sample below we will enter the Source URL from Google Webmasters and then redirect to the homepage. You can use relative paths here rather than entering the full URL as long as you are redirecting to a page within your site.
Once you have added the redirect you can go back to Google Webmasters and then mark the error as fixed.
How to bulk redirect 404 errors in WordPress?
If your site has a lot of errors in the search console then you will find it much quicker to simply download all the errors and then import them into the WordPress Redirection plugin.
In webmasters tools select all the 404 errors and click 'Download'.
Once you have downloaded the errors you can open the csv file in Excel and format the columns to just two, one for the original source URL and the second for the redirect destination. See our sample below:
Now you can save your csv file and get ready to import into WordPress, go back to Tools > Redirection and then select the 'Options' tab, scroll down to the 'Import' section and then select your csv file. Click 'Upload' and your redirects will automatically be added to your WordPress site. You can go back to webmasters tools, select all the 404 errors that you exported and then mark all as fixed.
Google usually takes a day to register your fixed URLs, this method works well for 404 errors but may not work for some server errors or .php URLs. You can also check within the Redirection plugin to see stats of your redirects.
I hope you have found this guide helpful, please leave comments below.
How to make a WordPress Masonry Gallery with just CSS
The WordPress gallery is a powerful feature that easily allows us to add image galleries to posts, pages and any other post type. You can set multiple columns of images quite simply, but to make a masonry gallery that will display vertical imagines without cropping can seem like a challenge. In this 'How To' guide I will explain how you can simply make your gallery into a masonry layout without any plugins or JS.
What it looks like
adamhaworth.com/stills/landscape
How will it work?
Making masonry layouts used to be a really pain and you had to rely on various external JS libraries such as 'Masonry'. Don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with using JS to achieve a masonry layout but in this case, it is overkill that will just add more resources for your visitors to load, slowing your site down unnecessarily.
We will use the latest CCS3 column-count property to create a masonry layout and inject it into your WordPress site using the JetPacks CSS module. The only downside to this method is that you will have to set the number of columns via CSS rather than in the gallery options, you can have different column numbers for different galleries if you wish. You can also set the masonry effect on just a single gallery or on all galleries.
How to do it?
All you will need is JetPack with CSS module active or alternatively, you can add the CSS directly to your own theme or child theme. I will be using the Chrome web inspector in the screenshots but most major browsers can be used.
If you are applying the masonry effect to all your galleries then you can simply use the gallery class identifier '.gallery', if you want to just add a masonry effect to a single gallery you will need the gallery ID.
To find the gallery ID simply open your web inspector, tap 'alt + cmd + i' on a Mac or 'alt + ctrl + i' on Windows to open the inspector tools. Select the gallery on your page or post, you will need to do this on the frontend, if you haven't published your post yet just preview it.
You need to look for the line of code similar to below, it will start with ID.
Now we can add the CSS to the gallery that will control the number of columns and form the masonry layout. If you are adding the masonry effect to a single gallery then you need to replace the identifier '.gallery' with your gallery ID, this applies to all CSS snippets below. Below also removes all the line breaks added by WordPress, we have also included a function to remove these if you need it.
Function to remove <br> line breaks completely, please use carefully. If you are unsure just ignore this and use the CSS method above to hide the line breaks.
The CSS above will use a column-count property to make the seamless masonry stacking of the images, below we will add some additional styles to make the images appear correctly.
The following style will adjust the gaps and reset any widths set my the default WordPress gallery styling.
Finally, this will make the vertical images match the width of the column and also removes any borders set by WordPress or your theme.
All the styles
Below are all the styles together as needed for the masonry layout.
Conclusion
You should now have a functioning masonry gallery, remember you can adjust the column count to the number you desire. If you have any questions or problems please leave your comments below.
How to filter posts in Divi using the same effect as the portfolio filter module
Recently we were tasked with creating a new site for the marketing agency Media Frenzy with CloudCanvas, we decided to use the Divi theme to make the site. We wanted to allow users to filter through posts the same way you can with the portfolio module but after some searching, we realised there was no custom module to do this. So we created the function ourselves and thought we would share with anyone else who wants to achieve the same effect with Divi.
See it in action: www.mediafrenzyglobal.com/news
Getting started
Before we jump in I'll explain a few drawbacks. You will need to have posts and categories, this effect is really only suitable for a few categories. The other drawback is that you can't use this with pagination, so you will have to display all the posts from your selected categories on the page. This works perfectly if you are filtering a small number of posts from a few different categories.
The Modules
You will need to create a page using the Divi Builder, on your page all you will need is a blog and code module. Within the blog module select the categories you want to display and select to display full width, you need to display full width and Divi uses a column effect layout to display posts in a masonry grid and because the posts are in columns they can't be filtered within a single parent element. Don't worry we will add our own CSS later to make the posts appear in a grid layout again.
Select just the categories you want to display, we have entered the number of posts as an infinite value of '-1' to display all posts from the selected categories.
Add the following CSS ID to the blog module "filterposts", you can also add the class if you want to achieve the same styles as in our sample.
We can start working on our filter buttons now within a code module, these buttons are very simple and you just need to create a button for each category you want to filter plus one extra to display all posts again.
This is what your buttons should look like, these are from our sample in the link above. You will need to change data-filter=".category-articles" to reflect your category, this is simply the class added to each post in the loop and it will be 'category-CATSLUG' so just find your category slug and add it to the data-filter and also change the text of your button.
You need to then insert these buttons in a code module as shown below.
Adding Scripts
Now you have finished with Divi, the rest we will have to make the 'old fashioned way' with some functions and scripts.
To make the filter function work we are using the jQuery plugin MixItUP. You can enqueue this script using our function below in a child theme. We have also enqueued a Google hosted jQuery library, you can remove this if you have already done this or don't want to use Google jQuery.
You will notice that the function is conditional so it only loads on the news page. You can either remove the conditional 'if' statement and enqueue on all pages or you can change the slug to the page you want to have the filter function display on.
Now the jQuery plugin is enqueued we need to add the options to make the plugin work with our setup. These are the options required to display the filter, we have placed these in a PHP function and enqueued them using this function to display in the footer of the site. Again this is a conditional script so you can remove the conditional statement or add your page slug again.
The Styles
All that you need to do now is add some styles to make the posts appear in a grid again. To add the styles activate Jetpack and enable the CSS module, we can then use SCSS within the CSS editor in customizer. Its important that you enable SCSS within the Jetpack CSS editor if you are going to copy and paste our styles. If you want to convert the SCSS to CSS for use on your site you can convert it here: www.sassmeister.com.
You will notice we have added some before and after pseudo styles to add labels, you can remove these if you like. You will have to adjust this CSS to match your color and font choices.
If you want to achieve a similar effect with different colors for each category you can follow this snippet of CSS to get started.
I hope you found this useful, please share and comment below.
How To Rename Divi Projects Custom Post Type
Divi is a fantastic theme and as you can guess it is one of my favourite themes for quickly designing almost any kind of website with WordPress. Divi comes with a projects custom post type which allows you to display posts in the portfolio module using the Divi builder.
The drawback to the projects custom post type is that not all websites are going to have portfolios as such but still want to utilise the additional post type.
While building a site for a client recently we used the portfolio post type to add tours to a tour guide website. We needed to change the post type slug but also wanted to change the admin menu labels so I wrote this short function that you can use to do the same.
You can place this function in the functions.php of your child theme or better still use a plugin such as 'My Custom Functions' to easily add the function from within your dashboard. All you need to do is replace 'Tour', 'Tours' and 'tour' with your own name, be careful when changing the slug, ensure you aren't already using the slug on another page or post.
Once you have added this function you will need to go to permalinks in settings and just click 'Save', this will flush the permalinks so your new slug will be used on your custom post type.
Looking to start using Divi? Try CloudCanvas, Divi comes included with CloudCanvas along with everything else you need to start your WordPress website.
Singapore & Sydney City Photography
This is a bit of a different post from the usual landscape photography that I publish. In September I took a trip to Singapore and Sydney. I wanted to get out with the camera as much as I could while there. I have to admit I didn't get as much chance as I'd hoped but below are a few of the images I managed to capture while in both cities.
Photography in a city is a new experience for me, being so used to the rural landscapes and waiting for sunsets and sunrises. The fast pace in the city was completely new.
I also struggled to find much inspiration, sounds crazy in such inspiring places but I tend to look for lighting and landscapes so looking at buildings for shots was just so new.
Anyway, please leave any thoughts in the comments below.
Landscapes from Waun Fach, Brecon Beacons
Waun Fach is one of the highest peaks in the Brecon Beacons and is the highest peak East of Pen y Fan. Located just South of Talgarth Waun Fach is easily accessible and on a clear day the views are spectacular, or as I found out even on a misty day they can be equally as spectacular.
I Set off on a Wednesday afternoon to try and find some locations on East side of the Brecon Beacons, I was hoping to get a good sunset shot across the National Park with the dominating peaks of Pen y Fan and Corn Du as the central point.
I arrived at Pengenffordd around 4pm and set off up the hills, I've never actually been up Waun Fach before and never expected to come back with any pictures on that day. I wanted to just see what was there. I slowly made my way up the first ridge and every time I turned around the light was spectacular. I never thought the mist and bright light would make for any images but a few interesting shots presented themselves.
From Pengenffordd you can want to the summit of Waun Fach pretty easily and quickly, it's only 3 miles from where you can park up. I've mapped out the path I took to get to Waun Fach, I'll probably go back soon and do a longer walk and write an article.
