Cummingston, Moray, Scotland
This beautiful ochre wave of sandstone bedrock lies deep within one of Moray’s fabulous sea caves. You have to be extremely careful with your tides so that you don’t end up trapped inside and you only get about an hour before you really need to vacate. The contrast is surprisingly high due to light leakage from the outside world and the pebbles piled up against the bedrock are still wet from the previous tide. Spooky but compelling and the colours are out of this world. Incidentally I had to allow for significant reciprocity failure for Fuji Velvia film.
Pentax 67II, 55-100 zoom, inverted 0.6ND Soft Grad, f/27 at 45 seconds, Fuji Velvia 50.
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I love the colors and lines here, Ian. This is clearly a captivating, intimate place. The processing looks perfect, no surprise there. This one was clearly worth the careful timing and your composition works great.
I might be inclined to bring into greater balance the sandstone, green and dark upper left with the pebbles washing into the bedrock. A square (or almost square) crop could achieve that and also minimize or omit the llc, which is too close for the dof. I did a quick and dirty illustration just using Windows Photo Editor (I like to keep other people’s images separate from my LR catalog 
. You might be able to crop even further down from the top, but I thought I would start small so you could see whether it feels interesting to you to explore that possibility. It is lovely as presented, and an 8x10 horizontal might work also.
Ian, all I can say is Wow !!!
I thought your previous sea cave post was outstanding, but this is something really special. Intially your eyes are dazzled by the combination of green and yellow/orange colors. But then one starts to notice all the wonderful elements in the left half of the image. Those small cobble stones and the striations in the sandstone floor of the cave add a lot of interesting complexity to this image that allows one to appreciate this image long after the initial impact of the color. And your composition makes this look very 3 dimensional. Beautiful image, it is very special.
I enjoyed the image as presented. The lines in the fg add to the different diagonals in the frame. Maybe the lower left gets a little bit soft as Marylynne mentioned, but that’s easier for you to say in the master file. Really different and refreshing scene! I really like the touch of green here.
Ian,
Wow is right! Love this - even a bit more than the previous post, although they are a bit different so no fair comparing.
No doubt the colors are out of this world - I’m sure more so than what you’ve presented. Processing looks awesome.
I tell you what caught me off guard as i’m reading your description was, “… significant reciprocity failure for Fuji Velvia film.” For a moment there, I had zero thoughts that this would have been Velvia… purple, dark, noisy shadows, then scanning… eeek! Well, this came out beautifully. Never would have guessed.
No nits or suggestions.
Lon
Thank you Lon
Actually the original above is as near as dammit identical to the Velvia tranny. The colours within these caves are seriously gorgeous. Nikon 9000ED scan and very little processing. Just careful tweaking at the scanning stage and a bit of additional sharpening.
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Thanks Marylynne
Square images are always compelling especially with more abstract scenes. I guess I prefer a few more diagonal lines in the foreground but the crop makes great sense especially with a few related images in a series of square shots.
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Another amazing sea cave abstract Ian. I love how all the different elements come together to create an intriguing image.
Ian, late to the party here. I also thought your last sea cave image was amazing but this has just taken a whole different level. I love the subtleties here. A minor suggestion from me is to burn the lower left corner a tad… other than that, this is perfect as presented to me.
