Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Now this is always a difficult one and I’ve spent a good while trying to work out which images represent something about me rather than just about the things I have found or the light that I saw them in. This is a little strange as they aren’t always necessarily my ‘best’ photographs but I’ll add a little text to each one to try to explain why I’ve chosen it.

Ripening

Although I got a few good images before October of this year, it was after a couple of days out in Scotland that I really got into the swing of things. This combined with some beautiful subject matter gave me the opportunity to be a little more experimental with compositions. This first composition relied on a few features. Firstly the combination of beautiful yellow leaves and abundant red berries. However, like many opportunities that arise when we’re out on location, just one tick in the box isn’t enough. The second featured was the amazing green lichen that was growing on the bare twiggy branches which combined with the bare branches picking up the blue of the sky provided a wonderful colour contrast. The third feature was that they were all in exactly the same plane, which allowed a very thin depth of field and allowed me to drop the background out of focus. The background is the final feature – a great transition from the dark bottom shaded area through the tree trunk and onto the sunlit bracken at the top.

So we’ve got a bunch of ingredients that add up to ‘potential’ – the creative part is now putting these together into a balanced and ‘pleasing’ composition. The blue/green shadow/lichen looked to me like some form of calligraphy so I used it to ‘write’ across the frame and placed the yellow/red leaves/berries in the top right to balance the tree roots in the bottom left. Most of the ‘tweaking’ was about how much of the sun highlights to include/exclude and to make sure the tree root structure in the bottom left had enough clearance around it.

Oh, and the square crop is intentional – I use a plastic mask on my ground glass to compose with. Makes a big difference in fine tuning compositions.

Arches

A glimpse of light showed me the potential here. However the sun only came out very occasionally so I was sitting waiting to try to figure out what it might reveal. Otherwise I would (and did) end up finding a composition that used diffuse/shaded light only to set up and for the sun to come out, and vice versa. In the end I figured the directional light was showing me more interesting views and once I saw something of interest I set up and waited for it to reoccur. In this case the light brought out some of the highlights on the reaching branch which itself was connected to a quite beautiful set of trunks.

Once I’d noticed this a glance around showed a that the supporting cast worked well, the grass was vibrant and held interesting texture, bright ferns sat in dark hollows, the red bracken provided a contrast to the greens of the grass and branches and finally I could position the trunks against a relatively featureless area of the background. On top of this the two larger trunks on the right leaned in a complementary fashion toward the main trunks.

Of course these thoughts weren’t as verbose as this and some of them occured as I sat behind the ground glass. The last step was to wait for the light to pick out the details again. this time I wanted just a subtle directional light to create a glow around the leaves (at least that was what I wanted at the time, I’m wondering if some stronger light may have helped now..)

Hanging Mosses

You might get the idea that I’ve had a bit of a thing about lichen this year but in fact these three pictures were all taken within about two hours of each other. They’re just off a small section of woodland called An Cnap near Salem, Ardnamurchan is just wonderful. I’m sure there are more places that have such a proliferation of licens but it’s the way the birches grow in a contorted fashion and a bank of trees on the edge that provide a background of dark areas or a woven screen against the sun. This last picture was caught hand held on my Sony A900. I was using it as a scouting camera but I’ve begun to realise just what wonderful colours it gets and also what a wonderful rendering the Minolta 28-135mm lens has, especially wider open.  The spherical abberations give a subtle glow to the scene that in this case worked incredibly well. The winner here is not just the hanging lichens but the colours graduations through the picture combined with the scattered, yellow birch leaves. The composition was just an instinctive taken on those two central branches/trunks whilst ensuring the edges worked and captured the gradation from dark bottom to beam of light at the top.  I shall be using the A900 in anger more often after seeing these results and comparing some of my digital and velvia captures (suffice it to say that the a900 isn’t quite the same but it’s very close and the differences are complementary ones).

Contrast

One of my favourite UK photographers is Tristan Campbell. His work was an inspiration when I started and he has consistently created photographs with a beautiful look. Recently his work has played with the use of strong contrasts and backlighting, making the most of colour neg’s incredible ability to deal with the gremlins nemesis. I’ve played with this myself but not in any serious way so far but this year I’ve tried to push things a little harder, trying to capture the backlighting and high contrast. This particular view was the sunset on the copse at the top of An Cnap. Thick clouds were stripping off the hills behind us creating the dark area in the sky but the last beams of light were picking out the yellow leaves. The composition was almost a pin wheel with an anti-clockwise sense of rotation towards the sun almost suggesting that the sun’s rays were working against the trunk and leaves on the right. Even the silhoutted trunks hold detail and texture, nothing is fully silhoutted.

Stobh Coire nan Lochan

I’ve been fascinated by these big views of the sides of hills since I first visited Glencoe. One of my first large format shots was a panorama of the three sisters. Last year I took the 10×8 (Black Betty) to Glen Nevis and shot the side of Ben Nevis. It’s the textural part of these views that fascinate and it’s the raw capturing horse power of the 8×10 that can capture the very fine colour textures and the quality of film that can either capture the dynamic range or bring out the tones in overcast conditions.  It’s made me realise that there is probably some mileage in continuing to capture some of these views, especially if I can combine it with the sense of sublime conditions like above.

Leaves and Flow

It can be very tempting as a large format photographer to try to get everything in focus. However, some of the advantages of many large format lenses are revealed when they are used with a narrow depth of field. The simple lens designs of tessar and dialyte lenses give smooth and creamy out of focus areas (Nikkor M and Fujinon A lenses in my case). Used in conditions such as this we can create a layer whose sharpness appears amplified by the softness of the background (This was taken on my 200mm Nikkor M lens). The composition itself relies on a positioning of a band clear of leaves that reveals the river and the hint of light in the river in the top left of the composition. In addition I wanted to place a bunch of leaves over the creamy, turbulent water. You can’t tell here but I was perched on a worryingly small wooden bridge with missing planks and I was terrified of losing things every time I removed a lens or lens cap. The only post processing was to tone down some of the green leaves that were disturbing the overall tonal relationships.

Birches on Ektar

It’s probably not a surprise to know that I’ve been experiementing with different types of film for the last couple of years and many times over this period I’ve taken the same subject on various film stock (to a ridiculous extent in my film comparison tests). At this point I’m only using a smaller range of films and in most cases either Portra (160 or 400), Velvia 50 or Provia. I’ve got some E100G, Velvia 100F and 100 and also some Astia left that I’ll use now and again. I’ve only just started to look at Ektar again having had some bad experiences in the past with it.

I think the combination of generally over exposing the film (I place the shadows at about -1 to -2) and also a change in scanning technique or just more experience has helped me make the most of this film. In particular I took a photograph of Ingleborough and Southerscale in the latest 2012 gallery that looked better on Ektar than Portra 160. The composition above was taken on Velvia 50, Portra 160 and Ektar 100 and the three images ended up looking very similar indeed with the Ektar looking closer to the Velvia than the Portra 160, in particularly in the greens. The image below shows Ektar then Velvia then Portra 400.

I’ll be posting a few comparisons over the next month or so..  Here’s the A900 shot in the meantime..

Sun Through Frosty Birch

I took a shot last year of the sun through the leaves to the sun and loved the effect. When I had the opportunity to do the same with frost and through the beautiful heart shaped leaves of the downy birch I couldn’t resist. Portra makes getting a result from shots like this a breeze. The main choices were in how bright to represent the sun and possibly I’ve darkened the area around the sun a little too much but it allows your eye to wander the leaves easily. A brighter sun would look more ‘real’ but would also push your eye to the edges of the picture – difficult balance.

Early Frost

Taken just a few minutes after the previous shot whilst out with Paul Mitchell and Roger Longdin at Burnham Beeches. I’ve always been more concerned with composition than light but I feel I’m at a stage in my development where I can actively combine everything together. In this case it was the raking light in the background that although it wasn’t lighting up the downy birch in the background, it looked as if it might be if I positioned things correctly. I had only been out in one frost before this and it reminded me just how magical these conditions are in simplifying shapes and tonal relationships. This is another case of using the panoramic format in way a little different from ‘Ooh look at the width!’ (I know I’m still guilty of this but I’m trying!). The sense of depth in the stage is reasonably strong through the use of obvious ‘planes’.

Ingleborough and Southerscales

I’ve been entranced a little with Southerscales since Joe Cornish took me there in the middle of this year and this particular composition came about when I was scouting the area with Paul Arthur. Originally I was trying to find something for Paul because the main area of Southerscales it pretty complicated and something a little more bling was desired. Paul ended up going over to Ribblehead and so I worked the scene a little. As I moved around I started to see the relationships between the horizon from Ingleborough and the stone wall and then the valley shape and the limestone pavement. As the sun  progressed across towards the horizon the clouds began to give me some more complementary shapes. Finally I wanted to capture the raking light across the limestone pavements and the grasses and so there was only a few moments to capture the frame as the light dimmed.

The Pulpit

David and Angie Unsworth took me to visit their ‘secret’ slate mine in the Lakes for which I’m am extraordinarily grateful. The location was superb and the larches, protected from the inclement Lake District weather by the walls of the quarry, grew tall, lush and feathery and the ground, inhospitable to the usual grasses was covered in mosses and liverworts. Perched on the end of a tongue of this moss was an oak tree looking for all purposes as if it were about to hold a conclave of the larch. Terribly anthropomorphic but I couldn’t help it!

Larches Wide

I try not to repeat the content of an image but in this case it was too tempting. This was in fact the first image captured and I was trying to capture the reaching larches mentioned earlier in the context of the quarry itself. I was trying again to create a panoramic composition that moved beyond “WIDE!” and I hope it moves your eye across the front from right to left and then back across the rear wall of the quarry. Most of the interest for me is in the 3D levels of the scene and the mossy ground, the beautiful feathery larches and the interest in the rear wall of the quarry. A particular favourite – if you like it, try asking me about the perspective fixes that were made in the production of the image and we can chat about whether they’re ‘legitimate’ or not..

So I hope you get an idea of what excites me and what I’ve been thinking about in my photography over the last 12 months. We’ll see where it takes me in the next year!

So I haven’t blogged much in 2012 but I’ve been busy on a little side project so hopefully you’ll forgive me. I have however been out photographing on the odd accasion. Not so much in the first half of the year where I only really went out making a short film with Joe Cornish about Phase Cameras during which time I took a few photographs (including this one).

Myself and my sherpa wife Charlotte went out on a few campervan trips where I managed a first composition of the year on the 10×8 Toyo (or “Black Betty” as she’s been christened). We also went on a short walk around Plompton Rocks with Dav Thomas and a stroll on Twistleton with Paul Arthur.

You’ll probably have noticed that I’m taking less 4×5 crop images. Well the images are still taken on 4×5 aspect ratio film but I’ve made a set of crop masks so that I can work on accurately framing 4×5, 6×12, square and occasionally 6×17. I’m also less religious about not cropping images in post processing. I’ll try to get it right in camera but if I see a composition that has the potential for being more open I’ll go for the wider composition knowing I can crop a little later.

However, apart from these four or five trips out, there was no further photography in 2012 until October. October brought a bit of a bumper crop though. Firstly I had a holiday in Scotland with my wife and we had my parents with us for the first week. Fortunately they walk more than I do and have resigned themselves to the occasional LF pit stop. The highlight of the first week with my parents was taking my dad out to show him a “proper sunset with mountains and stuff” and the weather gods played ball as I set up “Black Betty” again.

We also had some great fun wandering around Ariundle in Ardnamurchan including the prettiest little abandoned croft house.

The second week saw proper walking action and the return of the 10×8 yet again for an epic car park shot of the side of Stob Coire nan Lochan.

You can see a lot more of this week’s crop in the 2012 gallery but here are a couple that missed the cut.

We came straight back from the holiday to give an opening talk at David and Angie Unsworth’s beautiful exhibition in the Lake District where I managed to take a shot on “Black Betty” again (she’s getting a good outing this year!). I visited David to get an interview about his work and took a couple of pictures up Levers Beck.

A week to catch up on the magazine and then I was out in the lakes again with David Clapp and Justin Nugent. We had a lovely morning up Loughrigg watching the sun rise and then after a wander by Cat Bells we finished the day on Castle Crag where I captured a composition I’d been thinking about since my last visit. Here’s the morning shot from Loughrigg followed by the evening shot from Castle Crag..

This was followed by a day out with David and Angie Unsworth including a visit to a stunning slate quarry that I’ve been sworn to secrecy over – really sorry about that! Here’s some pictures that show just what you’re missing..

A couple of weeks later I was introduced to possibly the best area of woodland I’ve ever come across – Burnham Beeches is only a square mile but it has an amazing variety and every part of it has intruiging aspects. I think I took about 20 shots over a day and a half without looking hard (and only walking about 3/4 mile). Here’s a few that aren’t listed in my 2012 gallery.

I have to say a big thank you to Paul Mitchell and Roger Longdin for putting me up and introducing me to this fantastic location.

I also spent a great day out with Paul Arthur which resulted in a rather blingy Yorkshire sunset.

and had my only other frosty morning walk with Charlotte which produced one of my favourite detail shots of the year..

And that was the end of 2012 – December was spent catching up with magazine work and family matters and the christmas period included quite a bit of scanning in betweem subdued festivities.

And finally I’d like to thank all of the landscape photographers out there who have made running the On Landscape magazine such a pleasurable affair – you know who you are!

And so onto 2013 and as always I’m promising myself to do better in all aspects and to try to get out more regularly.

What the hell I’ve been doing for the last couple of months!!!

Well I can finally tell everyone what it is I’ve been doing for the last few months. In short, Joe Cornish and I have set up a company that is creating a Britain oriented, online landscape photography magazine. In long, it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for the last two years and have been actively researching for the last nine months. It started whilst I was out in the Hebrides with David Ward and we were talking about the direness of much of the photographic press and especially it’s landscape photography coverage. This, and multiple other conversations, convinced me that the photographic press can never have great landscape photography coverage. The reason for this is that they are beholden to their advertisers and this means that they have to create content that attracts users who are buying stuff. This stuff is either new photographers, photographers who are upgrading their equipment or photographers buying gadgets/tours/workshops etc. There is no incentive to cater for photographers who have ‘good enough’ equipment and who maybe have moved on to trying to work on their composition/art. In fact, they know that the majority of photographers only buy photography magazines for a couple of years and so there is no point continuing to create new content, so they just recycle the old content on a two year basis. Oh they might throw in the odd ‘interesting’ sideline (witness David Ward’s articles in Photographer Monthly). Amateur Photographer seems the only magazine that is willing to go out on a limb and throw some real curveballs (a recent treatise on Petzval lens construction for example).

Anyway – I rant. The answer was to plan something myself, something with that uses the advantages that the web has to offer (and that I have enough knowledge to make the most of). The following months saw me getting to know Joe Cornish through a couple of courses and finally being asked by him to develop a new website. The website has taken a while to sort out through no fault on either of our parts but whilst getting to know each other, the idea inevitably got talked about and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Joe saw the potential in the project too. So, we bashed heads and put together a plan where we could both contribute aspects that were of equal value and the company Landscape Media Ltd was registered and the ‘Great British Landscapes’ magazine was conceived. Unfortunately, I had a full time job and an employer that I had a lot of respect for and so the planning went on the back burner, tinkering with approaches and styles, etc.

In the end, I had to make a decision on whether the project was going to proceed and, after a supportive phone call with my wife, we decided to go ahead with things full time (well, almost full time – I’m working for my wife’s company for a couple of days a week and we’re incubating the project). This was three months ago and since then I’ve been clearing out some work (witness the Light and Land website going live for instance) and sorting out the business end of things and for the last two months it’s been full on researching and developing the project. Thing’s came together a couple of weeks ago where we were in a position to organise a launch date. The 18th of October will see free issue as a taster for everybody with content from a location guide of a popular Yorkshire gritstone outcrop through a technical offering on dealing with shooting into the sun and also a couple of screencasts from Joe Cornish with two never before seen pictures.

The website will be subscription based, or more properly, it will be a ‘freemium’ website. For those who haven’t come across this term, it’s seems fairly unique to the internet, it means that some of the content will be free and there will be a subscription fee for ‘premium’ content. The content that will be free won’t all be immediately free. Some of it will be but some other bits will be ‘delayed free’, in other words it will be free after a couple of months but subscribers will be able to see this content immediately. So subscribers will get ‘the full monty’ whereas others will get what will be a large range of well written content but maybe they’ll have a wait for a while for some of it.

So what ‘sort’ of content are we going to be producing? Well, obviously with a name like ‘Great British Landscapes’ it’s going to be British oriented. However, this doesn’t mean that it won’t be relevant for non-brits, a lot of the content will be nationality neutral. There will be an ‘issue’ every two weeks and each issue will include a location guide, an extended article on craft or art, a screencast or interview and a couple of reviews of books/websites or other photographic material. There will also be extracts and highlights from the web, hopefully such that you can pick up GBL and it will provide enough links to get the most out of the internet without taking you away from the real work (photography, if you hadn’t guessed).

Sooo – if you’re interested (I really hope you are) and might possibly be subscribing (I really hope you do!) then hop on over to Great British Landscapes and add your email to the box (and you might win a years subscription!). If you’re the sort of person who does that social media thang, you can also follow what’s happening by like’ing http://www.facebook.com/landscapegb or following @landscapegb (if you want to follow my personal tweets, try @timparkin).

Oh, and if you’re around Bradford on the 16th of October, Joe and I are giving the keynote speech for a photography conference at the National Media Museum and we’d love to have you (although you’ll have to pay and check there are tickets left of course – http://www.exposureleeds.org/photocamp).

Finally – what does this mean for this blog, well I’ll still be writing in it although it will probably become a ‘behind the scenes’ blog and I may be moving the whole website over to www.onlandscape.co.u (something like http://www.onlandscape.co.uk/timparkin). When I write stuff that might make sense to have a wider audience, it will be posted in On Landscape. We’re also including a few extra writers for regular features, including a special guest for the first issue.

We both really want this to reflect what the landscape photography community want and as such we’re really interested in your ideas as well so comment away…

Soo – it’s been a seriously long time since I’ve been posting but that doesn’t mean nothing has happened, quite the contrary. I’ll try to keep the updates separate but to summarise, I’ve been finishing a couple of websites and I’ve finally got the Light and Land website live! I’ve also nearly launched Joe Cornish’s new website (last few products being added). On the film front, I’ve finally got my hands on a fully automated Jobo developing machine (and flooded the office whilst plumbing it in) and a drum scanner! Me and a few people from the lf-photo forum have been running a scanning comparison and I’ve worked out how to get the best out of the Epson scanner in the process (with surprisingly good results). I’ve also been playing with all of the colour films you can use now you’ve had to revert to sheet film (if you’re a large format photographer that is). On the general side, I’ve been using the Lee RF75 kit which is working really well (and fits on my LF gear too!) and I’m starting to use the Canon Tilt Shift lens too, which is a smashing bit of kit and opens up lots of opportunities.. I’ve also been off the the Yorkshire Wolds with Paul Moon and Jon Brock and have to say it’s a place that rewards investigation. I’ve also been playing with the new Intuos, have started to use Capture One and have discovered the best noise reduction software in the world ever! (for film anyway – I’ve yet to try it on digital). The big news is yet to come though, I’m announcing a new business venture in September and it’s a biggy – landscape photography related and lots of new content..

I’ll write a little post about each of these bits of photography related fun over the next few weeks and keep you posted on the business venture too..