To crop or not to crop...

rays over loch broom, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

A great weekend, out to Ullapool on the Western coast of the Scottish Highlands, arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world. The contrast between the rural fields and dunes of my hometown of Nairn and the rugged mountainous coastline of Ullapool is amazing, even more so when you consider there’s only about 50 miles between the two. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I love Scotland so much, you have an incredible diversity of environments all within striking distance of your current location – brilliant.

We spent a very busy Saturday fishing a remote hill loch in the morning and then doing a bit of sea fishing in the afternoon. I can’t remember the name of the hill loch we fished, but if you look at my picasa stream, I’ve geotagged the pertinent pictures so that you can get the idea of where it is, there is no path, just a straight hike through difficult long grass and bracken to get to the top of viciously steep hill. Coming down was much easier!

Anyway, the scenery was beyond spectacular, looking down on Loch Broom to the east and the rocky coastline past Rhue and on to the Summer Isles in the west. It looks so good to the west that we headed off to the Rhue peninsula and did some sea fishing for a few hours. The weather was perfect for both photography and fishing, rolling clouds, shafts of sunlight and heavy showers blowing down the glen, brilliant.

I love taking landscapes, and my weekly jaunts around Nairn are really just rehearsals for opportunities like this. After 2 years of using the same camera body at least once a week, I can shoot with a fair bit of confidence. It really, really pays to practice so that when you are in a new environment/situation with the camera you can use it quickly and confidently. The scenary was so spectacular and it was very difficult to take a bad photo…or so I thought.

Something I’ve tried to shoot in the past are these shafts of sunlight you can sort of see in this weeks picture. They often show up during sunsets, when the sun goes behind a small cloud and the light splays out all around it. What I’m struggling with is getting the crop right. You can crop the entire picture so that you’ve just got the shaft of light and whatever it’s illuminating. That’s great, but you loose the landscape that the shaft of light isn’t illuminating, which can look a bit silly. I’ve gone with the alternative here, showing the shafts of light and their environment. I like it…but the shafts of light look more like “smudges” in the distance and whilst the landscape is really dramatic, I don’t quite know if the picture tells enough of a story.

The same can be said of portraits, I’m struggling with how much you crop. Just keeping the head and shoulders in the frame is great, but you loose all sense of the environment. You might see what I’m talking about with my shot of my nephew Dave, the one on Picasa is more environmental…it shows the loch we climbed to, his rucksack and tells a story about where he is. This shot however captures his face in a lot more detail, and forces you to look at him. I don’t know which is better…maybe they are both rubbish and I should just take up needlework as a new hobby!

In terms of this weeks shot, It’s a 5 exposure HDR with tweaks done in Photomatix and then Photoshop. I’m still not happy with it and might pull it apart and start again.

Next week, I’m on holiday from Wednesday and camping is on the cards….Thinking of hitting some hill lochs that I fished last year near Poolewe…we shall see but I’ll certainly have the camera.