Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Well maybe… I haven’t been out a great deal recently but I did get to visit a local reservoir with another local photographer, Jason Theaker. The weather looked decent and so after a short walk spent discussing the positive and negative sides of entering photography competitions (and the vagaries of the first round selection), we arrived at the banks of Lindley Wood Reservoir where we played around at the edges where birch and oak trees threw branches down into the water. The main photograph is one taken with my digital camera (I still haven’t had any large format developed for about two months – I must think I’ve got a right load of crap to wait this long). I quite like the result in that it transforms what is possibly an unappealling location into something a little magical. The quality of the light on the water needs to be seen at a higher resolution to appreciate.

So.. I’m spending far too much time working on websites and far to little time outside. The weather isn’t doing me any favours either, I bought a couple of cloud spotting books recently to try to understand why it’s so bloody awful (occluded fronts suck for photography is one of my observations). A very good visual resource can be found here. From what I’ve read, the area in front of a warm fronts should be quite interesting for photography.

I’ve also been to see the Ansel Adams exhibition in Walsall and I have to say that despite the some of the prints being amazing, the exhibition in general was a bit of a let down. There is very little extra information and the pictures are not displayed in the best of conditions (although it is in a light room which makes viewing OK). What struck me was the balance of the images. They are not ‘in your face’ (although moonrise might fit in that category) and carry the subject matter with a subtlety that surprised me. Overall I was very happy to have gone but disspointed that the curators could not have made a lot more of it.

Another aside about the Ansel Adams exhibition is the choice of pictures. Supposedly these were the pictures that Ansel himself wanted to display to best represent his love of photography. What we have is a little bit of a mish mash of great pictures with (in my opinion) slightly dull shots of buildings and people. Of course, this is the clash between what we like in our own images and what other people like. I think that these differences contribute more to what we think of as ‘style’ than anything overt. If we are picking compositions out from a landscape, we will obviously choose things that we like and hence, if our tastes are consistent (which isn’t a given) then what we like contributes greatly to our ‘style’. This conclusion also serves to emphasise the need for us to be good and consistent critics of our own pictures (for example, if we change our mind about a picture because everyone else likes it then we will obviously be absorbing other people’s styles).

I was discussing these themes with Mr Ward recently and I think we are both of the opinion that if two people like or dislike the same thing about a particular photograph then it probably says more about the two people than it does the photograph (my words, not David’s).

Anyway – back to website building and flip flopping between dismissing competitions as a ludicrous idea (as a self preservationist anticipatory response to not winning) and thinking competitions could be a great way of gaining exposure (as long as I win). Why I do this to myself? It’s the balance between self and ego that makes showing pictures to other people so addictive and yet so disturbing.

Bye for now – Oh.. and next post I’m going to be comparing scans from a Drum Scanner (my friend Dav Thomas has recently bought one for £250) an Imacon (Joe Cornish’s) and an Epson v750 (mine). The results are very interesting…