Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

The first time I’ve been out since the Scotland holiday and probably the most stunning sunrise and pre-light I’ve seen..

Stoke on Trent / Staffordshire isn’t the best known place for photographic subject material but me and my Dad checked out the maps and contours and figured there must be a decent view from a place called Cloud End (marked as just Cloud on the map) near to Congleton.

We got up well before sunrise had climbed a small rise to a heather covered peak. Finding suitable subject matter for the sunrise and under time pressure is a little scary. I managed to get a shot off just at sunrise itself and a couple of digital only before sunrise (the top shot is about 10 mins before).

Some of my digital shots came out too dark in the foreground even with 5 stops of grad.. we’ll have to see how Velvia holds up but I’m not expecting much..

On the way out we saw a peak in the background which must have been mow cop but it looked like a mini Fuji peeking through the mist. We scouted around for a bit of foreground and some rose bay willow herb and a small stone building worked really well in black and white (the colours were a mix of cold and warm unfortunately – not pretty)

Today wasn’t a great weather day but we decided to spend the time finding new paths through Glencoe.. We walked the length of Glencoe but there wasn’t much to be seen that didn’t need a lot of time spent working a small location (and I have to remember that this is a holiday for a non-photographer as well). But I did get a standard big rock and background shot of two of the sisters as seen below.

The main picture was taken that afternoon when I popped out on my own to see if there was anything worth taking around Glencoe village. This was taken just outside the village on the back road up to Clachaig and was almost a throwaway shot at the time (I’d wandered around looking for good ‘Autumn’ shots) but I’d been looking at Christopher Burkett pictures and Dave Schilliger and it must have rubbed off a little. This doesn’t mean that I think this picture is in anywhere near the same league but I feel it has a similar understated effect.. shame about the fence at the bottom right…

There is great enjoyment to be had from photographing a beautiful location.. There is even more enjoyment to be had when photographing a beautiful location under beautiful light. One of the highest levels of enjoyment I have yet experienced is photographing a beautiful location that is little known in beautiful light. Although experiencing a landscape shouldn’t be marred by knowing that thousands of other people have seen it, there is a frisson of pleasure that comes from knowing that you have found somewhere that isn’t normally visited.

In my case, this was so close to the busiest area of Glencoe that it is surprising that this isn’t more travelled. We found an area on the map called just ‘The Study’ and had to see what was there.. To get to the location, one had to cross a small stream (wading) climb a large bank and follow the drovers road for about 800yds..

Just about 3pm and an hour and a half before sunset we crested the ridge and the photo at the top of this post was in view before us. After a brief hesitation whilst taking the view in, the camera came out.. Just as I was putting my 5D on the tripod, I saw the last wisps of cloud being burned off Aogach Eanach and got the shot just as it curled over on itself. I also took a couple of large format shots but the dynamic range was a bit large (maybe blending would work?) and the cloud has burned off, leaving the whole picture a lot less dynamic. A glorious experience and one I’d highly recommend.

Tilt and swing are the two movements on the large format camera that seem to cause people the most problems. I’m not sure if I learned quickly because I thought about it differently or because I’d already used a tilt shift lens on my 35mm camera but I have an explanation of the effects that don’t involve maths or mr Scheimpflug..

Basically it goes like this.. On a large format camera, you focus by moving the film place closer to or further away from the lens. If you want to focus on infinity, you move the film plane Xmm away from the lens (where X is your focal length). So on a 150mm length, you want to have 15cm between the lens and your film.

If you want to focus closer, you move the film plane further away from the lens.. This is how all cameras work (except in a 35mm camera, the movement generally goes on inside the lens body).

So… if we tilt the lens plane so that the bottom half of the film is closer to the lens than the top half, then the bottom half is focused closer to infinity. And thats that! All of the maths is just there to help you understand the relation between the tilt angle and the focus distances..

Swing is the same, if the left hand side of the film is further away from the lens than the right hand lens. Then the left side of the picture will be focused closer (actually it’s the right side because of things getting flipped.. you can see it on the ground glass anyway).

If you apply tilt and swing, you basically have a custom focus for each corner of the film… However working out how much combination isn’t particularly easy.

The example at the top of this post needed a little swing to help the top of the wall be in focus.. If it wasn’t for the wall, I could have just used some tilt and made sure the heather was in focus and the middle of the gulley was in focus (near the light trees). But because the focus spread close to the camera is a lot lower than the focus spread at infinity, the top of the wall will be out of focus (or need a very large aperture).

In order to minise this, I knew I needed to get the focal plan something like in the picture below.. To do this, I know I need to put about half of the angle that I have used for tilt into the swing, as seen below.

This was taken just outside our chalet in Clachaig.. the result isn’t that brilliant but it was a nice exercise.

One of the down sides of using a dark cloth is being unable to see around you when you are setting up a picture (this is no Leica M!). I had thought of this and had plans to have a ‘guard’ around if I were to take any urban shots (which I may do for one of our company buildings, more on that possibly later). What I didn’t take into account is that it can still be a little dangerous even at 7am in the middle of Rannoch Moor.. Here’s how it goes..

Being as I’m still excited about the great weather and being in Glencoe, I couldn’t help but get up early again for a Rannoch Moor sunrise. Charlotte was happy to let me go on my own (it’s strange with non photographers.. Going back to the same location and standing around for hours doesn’t seem to excite them) and so I drove up to Rannoch Moor 80 minutes before sunrise (just to see what it looked like). Well, at 60 minutes to sunrise, I tried a 30 second exposure on the digital and got this

Which isn’t quite enough light to take anything unless I wanted to try 3 or 4 minute exposures (and being as I had no clue what I was taking, I thought I’ll stick with the experiment). So, another 30 minutes later (30 mins before sunrise) a 30 second exposure got this …

Whilst undoubtedly better, it’s still not going to win any Take That View (or whatever the competition is called). So it’s off to the other side of the road and back to the nikky nakky noo lake…

after lining up the shot at the top of the post, and starting to get some Scheimpflug on, I heard some baying in the background.. Ah! Dear I thought.. how nice! I wonder if I’ll get to see any? Focus.. focus.. curse.. focus.. “MOOOOOOOO!!!!” to which I reply “ARGH!!” and nearly stand up and knock my Ebony into the lake. “What the hell was that?” I pulled off my BlackJacket and looked to my left and 40ft away is the scene shown below…

I very slowly (but quickly) got my 5D out and recorded the evidence and then just stood there and watched them whilst they merrily trotted around.. Absolutly gobsmacked, I found it quite difficult to get back under the darkcloth to finish the exposure – but I did 🙂 … All I can say is it’s a good job I didn’t have a lens cloth hanging out of my back pocket 😉

Later in the day we drive around and try to get a shot of Castle Stalker (but the access was awful, it also stank) and went up to some falls on the way to Fort William (Inchree falls if I remember correctly) which were pretty dull (you can’t actually get to them). As a last jaunt out, I drove quickly up the road to Altnafeadh and took a shot of the river Etive and the houses nearby.. This was taken about 30 yards from the road and should be returning to me soon on a black and white negative (Fuji Acros).

and at the end of the day I saw

Although I love Elgol and Skye, even despite the weather, I was really happy to return to Glencoe. The place we stay (The Clachaig Inn’s chalets) is beautiul, comfortable and so handy it’s untrue.. The first morning we went out to the ‘usual’ spot to try to get a dawn photo (trying to avoid the cliche tree – now you know which spot). There was a very pleasant photographer from Edinburgh there before me and we had a good chat. I took a large format shot of my composition which has come out (The first version is the LF shot and the second is my Digital of the same place.. Incredible differences in colour, probably because of the way I have converted it (I took a photograph of it with a macro lens on the light table).

Composing this shot was a pleasure because it’s my first real photo where I haven’t been completely stressed by the process (well, it was still interesting trying to sort out the exposure – in this case taken of a mid gray on the rocks and a high mark on the light in the hills.

Then we took a drive up to Glen Orchy but my wife was a little tired and wanted to go on a walk rather than hang around in the same place (which was a shame as the location looked like it could be fantastic fun to spend the day photographing at).

However we decided to go for a drive down Glen Etive with the aim of walking down the right hand side of the glen. Unfortunately we were harrased by ticks, bogged down beyond beleif and swarmed by midges.. I could have coped with any of these on their own but with progress of about half a mile in 40 minutes we turned back, just as this view lit up.

I did try to get a large format shot but the foreground was very soon lit up with direct sunlight which ruined the effect.

Finally, we walked up robbers falls where the ticks came out in force to the point where we had to wear snoods and hats to stop them sneaking into our hair and down our fronts. Despite this, on the way down I saw this gorgeous tree and the light breaking through it. Again no LF shot as, although my gut said it was beautiful, I couldn’t work out why and hence didn’t take one. Trust my gut more…

Well you can’t say we didn’t try. At 4am we were up and in the car (you know you’re early when you wake up fishermen on your drive out of the house) and on our way up to the north of the island. 1.5 hours later we were at the foot of the Storr and there was a hint of light on the horizon and up til stopping the card, the view had been cloudless.. Unfortunately, as we looked up we could see some cover at the top of the hill… Never the less, and despite the cold and dark, we kitted up with gaiters, waterproofs and head torches and made our way up through the dark and forbodeing forest. About 5 minutes into the journey, the white noise we could hear revealed itself as rain and it seemed we might be in for a bit of a rough start. The climb was interesting but fairly hard and we got to the foot of the Storr to a howling gale, 30ft visibility and horizontal rain. Having got a large waterproof blanket and an oversize golfing umbrella, we retreated to the shelter of the forest and decided to see if we could wait it out. Two flasks of cofee, a couple of chocolate bars and two chapters of our favourites books and we concluded that this was a bit of a bad day again. Back down the mountain and drive back to Portree… And guess what, bloody sunshine!! Too tired to give a crap at this point, we drive back to Elgol.

The evening turned out a lot nicer but still couldn’t provide a sunset of any sort. I tried to find a more interesting portrait of the Behemoth and also a detail shot of the honeycomb rock that wasn’t cliched. I think I managed something interesting in the Behemoth shot, especially the green pool, but I should have positioned the Behemoth itself so it was falling into the picture (it was too dark to actually see much balance in the frame at this point – a crap excuse which means I was too hassled to relax enough to concentrate).

Well a day of mixed halves, firstly the rain that left nothing to do but visit galleries, of which the Three Herons was run by a very welcoming gentleman with a good eye for an original composition. A couple of excellent examples are Blaven and The Cuillin, A magnificent tree stump and a beautiful Etive rock forms.

The second gallery we visited was Wood Rising gallery which looked very interesting until I realised that I was getting bored of every picture almost as soon as I’d seen it. There were three or four good pictures (a good shot of sligachen and a couple of good intimate landscapes – mushrooms, moss and bark) but lots of very knee jerk twilight horizons.

With a bit of this inspiration, I drove up and down the Elgol road trying to find something that wasn’t as formulaic and the tree shot and the panorama here are what I got. The the tree shot was a fight against time and flare, with the light dissapearing rapidly and no chance of a 4×5. The end result is quite vital and is fairly popular. The panorama just doesn’t quite work for me though, it’s a little too flat and I don’t like the colour..

On the Tuesday we drive up past Uig to Duntulm castle to check out the views. Unfortunately the weather was, again, pretty dire and although there were one or two blasts of light through the clouds, there wasn’t enough to warm things up and there was very little wave action. The ground around the rocks was fairly barren (no thrift out) and the Castle itself had that typical worn look that most popular attractions acquire at the hands (and feet) of many travellers. We should have walked over to the far side but by this time a bitter wind had arisen and we retreated back to ‘Fawlty Towers’ (The Duntulm Hotel) for a quick dinner. We drove back down past Uig to the Fairy glen where we were hounded by outrageously intelligent guard sheep. Despite being followed by our ovine friend, I did manage to find an interesting location but the weather kept causing problems (wind, rain, blanket grey clouds). We should have walked around a little more but it’s pyscologically difficult to shake off the disspointment of being in a great location with dreary light. I took a couple of large format shots to see how much Velvia could rescue the situation but I have a feeling even this fabulous film can’t recover this much.

Monday night continued to be clear but as sunset approached, the clouds on the horizon crept over the sun. I waited around to see if I could get some twighlight shots and was intent on capturing the character of the large stone slab that must have broken off the ledge at the elgol beach many, many years ago. The first picture (shown above) was intended to be as imposing as possible and I also wanted to capture the texture of the surface of the water (inspired by Richard Childs picture of another part of the surface seen here).

The evening was also one of the lowest tides of the year and despite the following not being the best composition, I wanted to record the shape of the underlying rocks.

My final composition of the evening was from a position I had seen on the first night and came back to later in the holiday. The shape of the crack in the rocks appealed and I went on to take two more photographs around this structure.