Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Just a quick update to say that I haven’t dissapeared. I’ve been extremely busy finishing off a couple of websites for landscape photography related clients and will hopefully be able to talk about these next week. I’ve also spent the weekend with Joe Cornish where we got to play with recording some video content which I’ll be posting here soon. I met up with Melanie Foster over the weekend too and hopefully I’ll be posting a few new pictures from her when she’s got them post-processed (Hurry up Mel!).

Very little photography happening at the moment though (although the weather doesn’t make me feel that I’m missing anything).

For those that have been following the colour developing story, I’ve since been playing with some different times and have now settled on 7’00, 6’30”, 6’30” for the first batch and then adding 30 seconds to each step for the second and again for the third batches. I’ve also started using distilled water for the first dev, colour dev, last wash and fixer steps (The former to keep pH constant – I was getting very slightly cool pictures. The latter to get rid of any particular residue, filtered water would be as good I think).

There was also a bit of a worry over the last couple of weeks about the future of Quickload film in the UK when Robert White were saying that Fuji were no longer importing Velvia 50 in Quickload form. I spoke to the head of marketing at Fuji UK and they said that sales of 4×5 Velvia were very good this summer and the only films that they were stopping importing were Fuji Astia. Paul Arthur recently confirmed this separately.

Fuji Acros QL has stopped production however but is still available in sheet form. This is no surprise really, most black and white photographers will be very familiar with using sheet film and many will be developing their own and so they will be familiar with loading and unloading double dark slides (or grafmatics).

Interestingly on the Fuji Astia front, I priced up importing film from the BH Photo Video in the states and as long as you import in minimum quantities of 10x, a box of quickload can be had for £60 including delivery and all vat and import (which are niceley handled for you by the delivery service). I’ll be placing an order for some Astia quickload and sheet film as I am just starting to understand it and, in certain situations, I really like the results.

In other news, there was an interesting workshop in the Lake District recently run by Joe Cornish and David Ward for Light and Land where some of the best large format photographers were all gathered together under one, fairly wet, roof. Jon Brock has an interesting summary and some great shots (one of which I’ve included on the right) at his website

There are also some shots on Flickr from Julian Barkway and David Tolcher.