Most Scottish people know what Skye is about. You know that it is kind of a remarkable place.
It is not only what it is. Mountains, moors, water everywhere, but it is also the weather
pattern. It is combination of all these things together that gives it this strange power
and mystery. It is great to photograph.
There are two very nice areas on Skye that are connected
with legends, and fairies, and elves, goblins and Lord of the Rings and that kind of world.
Once called the Fairy Pools and if you look in the distance there is actually a series
of them all the way coming down there,
so we are going to track out there to these pools.
To me these waterfalls look like Victorian gothic paintings so therefore it is a matter
of me trying to make a statement other than coming here to make postcards. There is a
great danger as a photographer who has come to this and you are overwhelmed by the scenery
and then you make too much of the scenery and not enough of the photography.
There is that sense of gothic romance. Think about castles and ruins.
I have all of these things in my head so when I am working I try and pose that
on some of the pictures. I'm putting a mood into the pictures.
I'm going to shoot the fairy trees that have been sprinkled with fairy dust.
We will probably expose for the leaves and probably the rest will be fairly
dark and dramatic. I think because of the wind, rather than say let's shoot at thousand
of the leaves and not moving, I think it is the opposite. You want to shoot it at a slower
shutter speed and actually blur the leaves. There will be a slight diagonal across the
frame with the trees in the top left hand corner dropping down.
There has to be some kind of philosophy here.
So remember you go back to fairies and goblins and elves, so if you have that in your head,
then you go in with a philosophy. You don't have to follow it every bit but
try and find something a little bit mysterious.
You know, when the Victorians first came up here, they would just sit here
and paint the scene because it was raw nature.
I'm going to put it on auto and then when you get it locked in,
I'll go back to manual and I'm going to rack you out for a second, hold on.
Okay, now hit auto half way down.
What is the shutter at the moment? Half. It is pretty good.
My feeling about blurred water, sometimes it is the most overused technique
so let's see how much power we can get into the shot.
Hopefully, I'm not relying on the blurred water to make it effective and nice and
a bit surreal, so it really is kind of a classic Scottish shot like a gothic Victorian painter.
It still has a little sense of Lord of the Rings. I think it is pretty good. It is not
overly soft on the water, but it is soft of course. I think you would need a 1000/s to
stop this or more.
You want to get darker on that water because I know it is blurred but
you want a bit more detail in the blur.
Now, we like the motion, so what about aperture?
Yes, but I reckon it is 2 stops.
We are at 12, let's go to 14. Okay, try that.
There is that, and let me do this. That is great.
Look at the ground, the stones are worn from how many photographers
have taken pictures here. You have got to look at that and be very careful because you
are shooting something that is a postcard. You have to make sure: What can you do here?
We did a few exposures with movements on the camera but staying within a composition,
blurring that, so the rocks had an energy. Therefore, you have the ability now to fuse
these two shots together for the perfectly sharp image.
You lose their spontaneity. They become very digital artifact-y
if you try and do these things later. Whereas you do it in-camera,
the light is coming though the lens hitting a plate and you have a sense of energy then.
You are looking for something. That is what photographers do. They are always looking.
And then there is a programmed part of your brain that you got a connection with something,
so you are never sure what you are looking for but you are always looking. Sometimes
you just connect with something, it can be anything. It could be a macro shot. It could
be a tiny piece of movement in the rock here. I could be the water. It could be anything.
I think the beauty of this is actually the whole stone.
Yeah!
You could do a book on this entire water stretch here.
There are enough details here of beauty that you could photograph.
You could be here for three or four days but you got to balance out your time on a project
like this. So the project has a dimension to it.
I think sometimes you are sitting here
contemplating and looking at everything and then you think... about lunch.
You have to keep those assistants happy.