[Scotland 2017] The Giant Mushroom, Isle of Eigg

Here is another example of very long exposure of 241 seconds in my Isle of Eigg fine art collection. Lets discuss why I decided to use it in this shot.

The giant mushroom is a most famous and recognisable rock on Isle of Eigg rocky beach and obviously this is the first subject you see and want to practice your compositional skill with. But it is not easy to create strong composition with this mushroom for number of reasons:

1. Mushroom is very big and the place on the cliff with clear view is to close to it - you need to use very wide angle and still it is difficult to balance such massive foreground object with background.

2. Mushroom "grow" on the edge of tide and most of the time only left part of it touches the water - it will be much better if it was entire in the water or entire out of the water.

3. The waves comes in dance around the mushroom and I tried to capture these swirls with moderate exposure - but all results had too busy foreground and I discard all these frames.

After numerous attempts to fight a mushroom I came with the following composition, which I believe is strong and engaging.

• I put mushroom slightly of centre to the right, to balance it with enveloping white curve of waves on the left
• This curve lead the eye diagonally through the frame to the distant rocks on the right and to the Isle of Rum in background
• The blurred streaks of clouds mimic waves curve and add more motion to this shot

Very long exposure helped a lot to make this composition stronger - it created 2 main compositional elements (waves curve and cloud streaks) and it made foreground less busy.

Technical details:

Camera	Nikon d810
Lens	Nikkor 16-35 f/4
Settings	ISO 64, 17 mm, f/11, 241 seconds
Other	Single shot, ND 10-stop filter

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Anshar Photography
http://www.ansharphoto.com