Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

And so .. on to Northumberland.. as you probably have read, my mission to Glencoe was abandoned (after seriously getting my hotel bookings wrong for Nigel Halliwell and Adrian Hollister – sorry mates!). But there was no way I was going to miss Northumberland as well so even though I was feeling a little bit wobbly I was picked up by David Ward on the Sunday and myself, David and Paul Arthur were on our way. We did get a little tense when we saw the most amazing skies on the A1 on the way up and we had to revert to that old photographer standard ‘Nah, it’s crap, wouldn’t work. I’ve seen better. You don’t want to take sunsets anyway.’ whilst clenching teeth and muttering. We arrived after dark, brought our stuff in and had an early night in preparation for a bit of “pre-course” photography.

For the first dawn we took a leisurely stroll over to the beach at the start of the Wynding and took a couple of shots of “The Submarine” and of Bamburgh castle (I tried my best not to include the castle but I swear it sucks your camera toward it..). As it was a clear morning, I was looking forward to playing with the low skimming sunlight across the water, hoping to capture some of the gossamer threads of light that I’d seen in a couple of my other medium length exposures of the sea with sun. My first exposure was too long to capture any of this at over 20s but I really wanted to get a shot of the HMS Farne Island and the foreground ridge with it’s angular rock pools. My ‘successful’ composition was the castle shot but I’m hoping that it works because of the shapes of the wave shadows (the sun was so low that the peaks of the waves cast shadows) and the shapes of the foreground foam continue and mirror each other.

A little known fact of some use to landscape photographers is that the sun takes between 2 and 3 minutes to go from touching the horizon to completely over the horizon so now you know how long you have once that speck of light appears In my case I had enough time to take a second exposure on Provia which I’ve cropped and included below. The colour difference is quite striking.

What did I learn out of these shots? Well a couple of the main lessons for me are that to capture movement in the water in a way that doesn’t end up as fog and yet doesn’t freeze action needs a shutter speed of between 1/2 to 2 seconds (depending on how close you are I suppose). I love the effects of the light in the water if you look closeley at the main picture and would like to feature these effects as a central motif in a picture sometime. The other lesson is that, again, I need to simplify my compositions more. The submarine shot is nice but it doesn’t have a pleasing graphic composition, it’s all jerks and stutters. The last lesson? I love the seaside! Water is a fantastic subject and one I need to spend more time on..