Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

This picture is inspired by a photograph by David Ward of some moss in Iceland. The photograph caught my imagination in that the static moss looked like it was flowing down the page. The picture is Verdant Moss and for a few weeks I kept returning to it, working out which aspects of the composition were working for me, planning for a time when a similar opportunity may occur.

When we were in Cornwall, we visted a place called Strangles which is a slate/sandstone beach infamous for it's black pebbles with quartz streaks. On the way down to the beach however, there is some of the most verdant flora - a lot of it specific to the slaty substrate and high iron content. Stonecrop is particularly beautiful and when I found this cascade I immediatly remembered David's composition and set out to try to work a similar effect. Hopefully the stonecrop will look like it's flowing down the page and the grass at the bottom alludes to the final drop.

In a lot of my study of photography and art I try to examine what parts of pictures work for me and attempt to distil those parts into patterns that I can reuse. This is not so far away from the software development I do where even at your most creative, there are patterns that get reused because they are known to work optimally. Of course, sometimes a picture cannot be broken down like this and sometimes you see something in the field that works despite not matching any patterns. The path to creativity for me is the dividing line between the use of my library of patterns combined with trust in my own perceptions.

Take a look at the detail here