Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

There are two main projects I want to learn through during the first part of 2008. The first is the limestone pavements of the Yorkshire dales. These abstract stone structures satisfy a few requirements: geology, the process of change an flow, a large range of small, almost architectural structures and a beautiful but forbidding location. The second is the sandstone beach at Whitby. The beach satisfies the same criterion as above but also adds actual water flow, which if handled with subtelty can add a wonderful element of dynamism to a photograph.

Both projects are also minimise the requirement of dramatic light, for instance I don’t need to have wonderful coloured skies to show the shape of the limestone or the texture of the sandstone. This gives me the opportunity to work on a more flexible compositional level rather than questing for ‘the light’. Not that good light is not needed, it’s just the definition of good light changes.

Whitby has it’s own challenges though, the first I encountered was the mess that the beach gets into after people have walked their dogs and made a few sandcastles. My first trip to Whitby was at a very low tide as I didn’t know where the rocks were going to be revealed. Well the rocks are at the top of the beach and the low tide meant that they had suffered weeks of bipedal and quadrapedal stress.. This trip is only the second time I’ve been to Whitby and I wanted to make sure I at least started with a pristine beach. However, I didn’t know how high the tide had to be to clear the beach. The tide predicted (by Belfield’s Tide Plotter) for Sunday morning was 4.6m at 8.23am so we (my wife and I) decided to get to Whitby for about 8 to catch the sunrise (if there was one) and then to park up near the beach to see what level the tide was at. I was expecting the tide to be washing around the rocks where I wanted to shoot but was surprised to see the tide engulfing the small cave and completely covering the rocks I wanted to photograph.

I was also quite surprised to see a queue of people waiting to cross the beach even at 9am. It took until 11am until the tide was low enough to access the first lot of rocks without risk of getting water over the top of my boots when the surges came in. According to my tide table, this means that the tide level was approx 3.5 meters at the point where the beach started to become accessible.

At this point it was also the time when I would guess approx 60 people were queued up to walk about 15 dogs and 20 children. I did get a few photographs though.

The other thing that varies dramatically at Whitby is the amount of sand. This may sound a little strange for people not familiar with the coast but the sea can move hundreds of tons of sand over very short periods of time. When we went to Whitby last time, the peak tide was 5.2m and amazingly the level of the sand was about 30cm less.. This lower level of sand reveals some of the cleaner and more worn sandstone layers which gives more to look at. I’ve yet to work out when the best time to find this lowered level of sand is but from the evidence I have so far it’s during the large tidal ranges and also just after stormy weather.

Taking the photographs shown was also aided by the use of my home made ‘quick disk‘ which is a simple tool whereby you print out a page onto card and cut out a small disc and a small ruler. Place the ruler on your subject (against a rock for instance) and then measure it using your ruler on your ground glass. The scale on the ruler tells you your bellows factor.. Incredibly simple and sooo useful.