Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

This weekend, apart from being my 10th wedding anniversary, was also the Light & Land Discovery Day. This is a yearly dip into the world of landscape photography workshops supplied by Charlie Waite’s company and ably run by Jenny and David Ward. As I had a part to play in this years affairs (which I’ll come back to in a moment) I travelled down to Reading on the Friday night with Charlotte and whilst she was visiting friends in London, I spent the day chatting about photogrpahy with a few of light and lands leaders (Adrian Beasley, Giles Stokoe, Ben Osbourne, Nick Jenkins & Peter Hendrie). The conversation was particularly interesting when talking about the role of video in stills photography and how an understanding of cinematographic techniques can be transferable – in particular when used in portfolios of picture where the order in which they are read can be controlled to some extent. I was surprised that such discussion wasn’t dismissed by other photographers as ‘not our place’ and was pleased at the open attitude that everybody had. I’m still playing with all of this but it’s good to know I’m not going to be immediatly shunned for doing so

I had my alcohol allowance for the year at dinner where I shared a table with David Ward and his wife Jenny along with large format photographers Anna Booth and also Phil Staff (who is a recent convert to the ‘dark slide’) and Eddie Ephraum. Far from being a hub of philosphical discussion, the evening tended toward water pistols & horns (both literal sort and also many a double entendre).

The Sunday was the discovery day itself where a variety of trade stands (Canon, Epson, Paramo, Daymen) and talks took place. The highlight of the talks were David Ward’s “Slow Photography” and a group discussion between Joe, David and Charlie who were critiquing a set of each others pictures taken with point and shoot cameras. The interesting thing about this excercise was the ease in which it was possible to guess who’s photograph was whos, even when Charlie took abstracts, Joe took Cornish detail shots and David took Tuscan landscapes. The attention and focus of composition and, to an extent, subject choice immediatly indicated the attitude and identity of the photographer.

Charlie finished with an announcement that my secret project will be launching in February and so I can finally reveal half of the work that has been keeping me from taking photographs recently. The new Light and Land site has been cooking away properly over the last eight months in my spare (!) time and was at a stage to show a few people and get some feedback. I think it is one of the nicer website designs I have made and is doing some particularly clever (i.e. convoluted and scary) things to keep everything up to date from Light & Land’s master database. The result should be a lot more user friendly and search engine friendly and also will finally provide the opportunity for clients to keep in touch with each other after a course without having to hassle the tour leaders for email addresses. I’ve included a screenshot of a couple of pages on the right hand side of this post so you can see what it looks like. The last steps (payment integration, clients uploading pictures and testing) is going to happen over the next six weeks. If you are interested in helping test it (which would be really useful for me) please let me know.

I still have a coupe more websits to launch (the main one of which is mostly finished and just awaiting client sign off) and after that I’ll be starting my own personal project in the new year hopefully to launch in May of next year! More about that nearer the time.

Finally just a big thanks to David and Jenny Ward for organising such a fun event. Next year can you make it a bit further north though!