Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Our next to final day in Glencoe was for me a revelation of sorts. We decided to return to the valley behind Ballachulish and take the walk that we had tried with Richard Childs. After taking a couple of photographs next to the river, we headed up the hill and passed into a small glade of birch trees and ferns; the remains of a mine cutting I think. I started to see combinations of colour and texture that were separated by considerable distance, with alignments of elements drifting in and out of focus. I’ve talked with people before about composition sometimes being like a three dimensional game of tetris or like one of those christmas cracker games where all the peices must be exactly aligned for things to snap together properly. In this case I had seen two separate elements, a branch with fantastic autumnal colour and a birch tree surrounded by ferns in a small hollow but also with distinct darkening on one side of it’s trunk which enhanced it’s visual depth. I wanted to capture one or the other somehow and I figured I could try to combine them both despite them being 6 or 7 feet apart. The result has become one of my favourite photographs (despite 3 of the 4 transparencies I took having blurred leaves). The alignment of elements in a picture and the way a composition can lock together was something I felt very strongly during the taking of this picture.

I’ve included a picture of a side view of the composition below..

I try to work out what I’ve learned after I’ve taken each picture (or walked away from a setup) and also after I’ve developed the picture. In this case it was another step to realising that a location can have potential locked up inside it like a complex puzzle. Unlike christmas crackers, you don’t know if you’ve got a prize and you might have more than one!!