Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Third full day on the island and I decided to join everyone for a sunrise on that funky beach with the black and white sand. Rhum was looking particularly blue and I wasn’t getting turned on by the scene. I wandered backward and forward for about an hour, taking a couple of shots but knowing I was doing very little original. Finally, I was looking through the ground glass and realised that the arrow shapes were looking like comets flying through the blue heavens and the reflection of the island was creating a mystical, blurred, dreamlike vision (I was starting to come down with the flu properly by now so this may have had something to do with it). The first picture on the right shows what I saw.

My favourite picture of the morning was of a small fan of sand and water that seemed to be hanging from some kelp. The picture was taken with an 80mm lens with me about 2 inches from the sand. It was a real struggle not to change the flow of the water by just compressing the sand around me. This was another moment when I was thankful for my waist waiders, I was kneeling, and sinking, in wet sand for about 30 minutes working on this picture. I think the kelp really works as an anchor for the picture; any feedback appreciated though.

Me and Richard Childs went over to Singing Sands at about 12 and spent the whole day there. The beach is stunning, the whitest sands which squeak when you walk on them (see video below) and all along the cliffs are a series of waterfalls that have carved channels and tunnels through the rocks. One particular section, probably known as “Joe’s Canyon” (See Scotland’s Coast) is a waterfall that you access through a small slot canyon. You can also climb behind the whole waterfall through a small cave or, if you go further up the beach (beware of getting trapped by the tide) another long slot cave. I got a quick capture of a green waterfall and then walked back to the main singing sands beach and joined Richard for sunset. About two hours before the sun went down saw me and Richard looking around some rock pools at the top of the beach where Richard quickly discovered that the strange sands also form quite powerful quicksand. It must be that the sands are made of particles of pumice and hence are lighter than quartz sand. As you move your foot under the water, it just gets sucked down very quickly (down beyond ankle depth in a handful of seconds). This made getting stable tripods particularly difficult. I finally found a composition that worked using the warm toned rocks at the head of the beach including a small run off of water and some very tasty looking kelp (when you start to look at kelp and think of food, you really know you’ve missed too many meals!).

As I hadn’t taken any obvious pictures of Rhum yet and the evening looked interesting, I tried to find an area on the beach where the rocks formed a regular, clean arrangement. The quality of light and the dark rocks had me in mind of the Moeraki boulders in New Zealand. The composition that really worked for me was only possible using my digital camera as I would have needed a 65mm lens on the large format to capture (Richard chided me for not asking him as he had one in the bag. The results were quite satisfying. A view from Eigg that I hadn’t really seen before. I tried to take a couple of shots with my large format anyway but they didn’t have the same feeling.