In the Woods – Eigg but no Rhum
On the second day me, Tamara Kuziminski and Dav Thomas wandered inland to have a look at a forest path that Richard had told us about. On the way to the path, we stopped to taste some blackberries (Banana flavoured ones! Really!) and saw a wonderful old, overgrown croft house surrounded by wild Fuschia. I tried to capture the blanket of fallen flowers but I couldn’t get any clear compositions using the shapes of the fuschia. As I wandered past the window of the house, I noticed that a stand of beech trees in the background was being subtly lit and the incongruity of looking into a house and seeing trees attracted me to the window, which was framed by fuschi flowers. I focused on the flowers at the bottom, dropping the wall out of focus, and tilted so that I would have some of the top of the wall in focus but more importantly the rest of the fushchia would be in focus and my depth of field would include more of the trees at the back of the picture (if I had focused just on the flowers, I would have ended up with the rear trees being too out of focus. It was also good to get some definition to the top of the window frame).
Our trip continued on to the forest road where we found that the edges of the road had grown wild with birch, elder, etc. all sitting in front of a dark green Sitka Spruce wall. We managed to cover about half a mile in four hours, finding interest every hundred yards or so. The most interesting section was where the forest had been cut back, with heather and bramble growing over the rows of stumps and through the dead fir branches. Dav got an excellent shot of the end of the forest and I was happy with some heather and a few sticks..
That evening we went back to the Angry place and I still had problems finding anything I could put into a picture. The main problem was Rhum. It just sits there on the horizon, taking up most of the view. You either have to include it completely or exclude it; unfortunately excluding it didn’t leave much photographically. I took a picture looking left towards the Sgurr but I’m not 100% happy with it (the clouds aren’t working with the view, the light isn’t right and Velvia has given it a slightly psychedlic feel when it needed something a bit foreboding – a black and white from the previous day looks better although the composition wasn’t amazing). I did manage to forget my head lamp yet again so an even darker and more dangerous journey back added to the elated feeling upon finally returning to the house for thai green curry, cups of coffee and some picture browsing [and no Jenny – they aren’t rejects 😉 ].
The Problem With Rhum
The issue with going to a place where you are working in a small area with such a big feature is that it’s difficult to avoid. Rhum is a lot bigger than it looks in the photographs you see. You need lens wider than 24mm to capture it all in one go (or wider than 90 on a large format camera). If you crop Rhum in half, photographs look wierd. So it’s either all or nothing. There isn’t anything behind you though. and the coast line either side isn’t particularly interesing. So getting creative on Eigg is a reall challenge unless you want to come back with a portfolio of multiple pictures of Rhum with different foregrounds in different weather. (You know, Rhum with stripy sand, Rhum with funky rocks, Rhum with white sand and boulders). I certainly didn’t dislike taking photographs of the coast on Eigg but it’s tough to do something original.
