Just a short post today about some of the beautiful images made on my recent Eigg workshop.

I’ve enjoyed coming here this past fifteen years because it’s a great learning environment: We are able to repeat locations each day because we only have two.

The weather, as well as changes in tide can transform a landscape, and I have never found this place to be limiting to what one can shoot. I also particularly enjoy the fact that the group get to ‘know’ the place, and go back to work on a particular part of the beach that they find interesting.

It would be easy to assume that over fifteen years of running a workshop here, that I would have seen everything by now, but this has never been the case.

Rosti’s image above proves this point to me, as does the other two images featured in this post today. Shot on the most northern beach on Eigg, I have often found that this particular beach is either a hit for the group or not. Some weeks I come here, the group either find they can’t see much here, or they wish to return every day because they are finding so much. This week’s group found the beach engaging and I saw different compositions here that I have not seen before.

On the first morning we came down to the beach and it was one of those ‘rain hanging in air’ sort of days. Where there is a fine mist of rain on everything. Hard to stay dry and hard to keep the lens dry as well. But we got plenty of nice images. Philippe had said upon first arriving that he did not feel there was much here to photograph. I think this is a common problem for many: being able to get beyond what they see, or perhaps to overcome how the feel about being in bad weather. Rarely does one look at a photograph of bad weather later on and think ‘how horrible!’. Mostly we tend to enjoy the tones and atmospheres present. The image above is such a case. The quality of the light that morning - particularly at twilight gave off a ‘teal’ colour which I think very beautiful.

Andy’s photo of Laig bay is interesting. The shot made a few minutes earlier was nowhere near as interesting as this shot is - all because of a shallow tide that came in over the green and red rocks in the foreground. This brought on a less defined, low contrast foreground. It is a subtle minimalist study that I have not seen before on Eigg and which I enjoyed very much.

I think next year may be my last year, certainly doing the workshop twice a year. It is a very long day for me rising at 5am and not finished with the group until 9pm each day. I am now 15 years older, and I’m starting to notice it :-) But it is a wonderful place and if I were not running a workshop here, I would still come back on a personal level.

Last week’s group worked very hard to make good images. It was a joy to review and edit the work for them. Here is the final portfolio we completed by the end of the week. Please note that since I choose which images to edit, and also edit them, they perhaps have a feel of one photographer. It’s purely intentional as I try to show them through the week how to tune a set of images to be a portfolio.