I’ve taken a lot of lighthouses in my years because I find their idea insane: build a structure in the most inhospitable places, put a few guards in it, and make them keep the light on. It’s crazy.
This insanity made me go round a lot of the Scottish East coast lighthouses to photograph them.
What attracted me in this area is the forest of concrete posts around the lighthouse. I have no clue what they are for. There were make 50 of them. It made me think of a fossilised trees.
I composed the photo by placing the zigzagging path in the foreground and letting it go to the lighthouse so that the eyes are guided through the image. I liked that the path was old concrete like the posts and had a lot of texture. That keeps the eye interested in that path.
The lighthouse itself if only the apparent subject of the photo. It was fairly sunted, unremarkable, bland. It wasn’t a great lighthouse. I placed it on a third line on a mostly uniform sky background to make it the end point of the eye journey through the photo.
I tried to place the posts in a restricted area of the frame to make them a band. I didn’t want them to take over the frame completely. So I had to move and find a spot that excluded quite a lot of them (I was surrounded by them). To me that broke down the image in 3 areas: the sky, the posts, and the foreground path.
What I messed up is the placement of the lighthouse. I should have placed it on a third intersection, or in the middle of the width of the frame. As it is, it’s slightly off centre and I don’t like it.
Also the grounds were slanting to the left. The photo is level with the sea, but appears slightly unbalanced because of the wall around the lighthouse that seems to go down on the left.
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