Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

It does sound like the Castle next to Greyskull and is certainly as spooky. This is from our holiday in the lakes last week. I only took four photographs as I was doing a lot more walking (three wainwrights in three days with LF and digital kit!).

Castle Crag is actually one of the most interesting of peaks. Only just 1000ft but situated at the foot of Derwent Water and providing views over the whole of Borrowdale. My new favourite part of the lakes. These ‘standing stones’ have supposedly been here for a long, long time.

Can’t get much more S curve than that either!

One of the pivotal choices when using film cameras is choosing which film to use for a specific subject. Many ‘romantic’ landscape photographers choose transparency film for its immediacy (you can see what you’ve got) and the way it boosts colour and from the contemporary landscape photography side we have the majority of photographers shooting negative film, mostly low contrast film for that ‘deadpan’ look. However, some transparency film is quite natural and low contrast (Kodak E100G) and some negative film is high contrast (Kodak Ektar) so it is useful to see the same picture taken with many different types of film. This particular composition was taken on thirteen different large format colour films, some of which are not made anymore but which were included for reference.

In this case it was the Fuji Velvia 50 that brought out the lush colour although it did have some problems with the ‘glow’ around the castle. The subect matter was one I’d been looking at when driving past for the previous two years on our family holidays. The poppies and lupins, drifting from nearby gardens, create a unique view of a well photographed landscape icon. The arrangement of poppy heads and the natural path between them to the castle were critical to guiding the eye to the castle and the sun. A photographic test turned into a successful photograph. See this test and more here, here and here.