Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

On the Tuesday of our holiday in Glencoe, all of us (me, Charlotte and my Mum and Dad) decided to walk up the Glencoe valley from Clachaig all the way up past the old road. The day wasn’t particularly good weather for vistas so my Dad and I walked over to the river coe and wandered around, me taking detail shots and my dad experimenting with long exposures of the waterfalls around the area.

I was looking at an area of strange geology near the edge if the river which I think is the edge of a magma intrusion where the existing rocks have been changed by the heat and the pressure into new rock types. The particular area I was looking at was obviously once a sedimentary composition of older volcanic materials and has many different colours which were brought out by Velvia, from greens to purples.

During our walk up the Glencoe valley, we decided to take a walk down to the river at the upper part of the valley. There is no official access to this part of the valley but if you’re happy walking up the road a bit and crossing over the road barrier then you’ll experience an area of Glencoe that is more like it was before all of the tourists arrived. Because it is at the top of the valley, it receives less light and more moisture which means it is lush, incredibly lush. Also, river here is more like the Etive in that it as the same mixture of hard green and pink rocks into which the river cuts twisting gorges.

I hung off the edge of one of these gorges and tried to capture some of the colours and the deep azure of the water. This particular picture used the largest amount of perspective correction I have ever used in order to adjust the perspective of the picture. As I pointed the camera down, the waterfall at the top was stretched vertically as it was on the edge of the picture (this is the effect that stretches peoples faces if they are on the edge of a wide angle picture). Because I wanted the rock protrusion to be the dominant part of the picture, I pointed the camera at the waterfall and then used front fall to bring the view downward. This made the waterfall undistorted and stretched the protrusion. The effect isn’t huge but I think it balanced the picture better.