Our accommodation in Mljet was an eco-apartment in the little village of Soline, on the shores of the Great Lake just at the point where it meets the Adriatic Sea. It was a little village, in the sense that there were about 6 families living there, and apart from their houses and the apartment blocks that some of them rented out to tourists, there was nothing else to be seen there, apart from the scenery that surrounded it.
One of the families ran Soline’s only restaurant, although others provided dinner on request for the guests of their apartments. It was a peaceful place, with no through traffic, and one of each day’s highlights was the visit of the bread man at 10am each morning.
Our main mode of transport around the island was bicycle, and due to a recent baby boom which saw the average age of Soline residents lowered considerably, cyclists had to dismount when making their way through the village. Just about at the point you had to do so on your way into Soline, the view shown in the photograph above was situated on your right hand side. The boat in the foreground is a working fisherman’s boat, and on the day that I took this shot my eye was caught by the way the evening sun light was falling on the boat.
Having just dismounted from my bicycle, I took my camera out of the backpack and set up to take a photo. Being a landscape shot, my first concern was to keep as much of the scene in focus, so I used a narrow aperture of f/16. I spot metered on the brighest section of the boat, and then set the exposure compensation to + 1.5 stops so that it would remain bright in the final image, but not be blown out. That gave me a shutter speed of 1/40s, which is slow, but with my 17mm choice of focal length – wide to encompass as much of the scene as possible – not too slow to hand hold.
The sunlight caught the trees across the lake nicely too, and I like the reflection of those in the rippled water of the lake. At some point I may re-process the image to bring out some more detail in the yacht that is hidden in the shadows of the background, but the shot for me is all about the rowing boat, and so for a first cut at processing it I was happy to leave it as the subject of the shot.
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