Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

The day after our Lochan walk was mostly pretty dreary so we had a 'rest' and only ventured out of the afternoon. We went back to the Glencoe valley to have a nose around the next inaccessible bit (I don't know how else to describe it). This time the area was right next to the pass at the head of the valley and again was accessed by crossing the crash barrier. The area was amazingly lush, probably due to it being inaccessible to deer and sheep. I planned to get two types of pictures (as well as scouting out for ideas). The first was a general shot up the valley but including the lush foreground and the glacier scouring on the hill before the lost valley. I also wanted to capture some twilight shots after seeing some of the amazing quality of light that Paul Schilliger gets (although he is in the Alps - it might help). Anyway - both shots I captured were a little dreary, I think I was concentrating too much on subject and not on composition. I shall be trying to get some more twilight shots in the future as the diffuse, shadowless affect can be other worldly..

Continuing on my daily review of our Scottish holiday, we're on a talk around the lochan in the hospital grounds below the Pap of Glencoe. Also, apologies for the slow posting at the moment, I'm working long hours during my full time job (internet software development) and also creating a site for a holiday company and a landscape photographer. I've also got a new site and have just finished captioning the pictures for it. Hopefully now I've finished the site updated I'll get a few more posts up. Fortunately I've not been out with my camera since Scotland so I'm not working up a back log...

Anyway, back to the lochan. The walk is a very gentle one with well maintained paths and little in the way of inclines; I have a feeling it's been specially designed as a physiotherapy walk for heart patients (they have little heart icons on the wooden signposts for the gentler walks). This doesn't mean the walk is uninteresting though as it takes you around a wonderful little lochan, through some forest areas (mostly fir but some deciduous) and it has great views of the pap.

As I was going around the walk, I had two photographic ideas in my head; one was to try to capture the ferns that were growing out of the sides of trees and the other was to capture the star moss that was so prevalent, sometimes in banks as deep as a couple of feet. The fern picture opportunity came first but I had a great deal of trouble creating a composition until I decided to use the tree-ferns as background material. One large fern was in the foreground that I could use and, with the help of a little 'crutch', was in just the right position to match the curve of the tree (pretend I didn't mention the crutch thing)..

The main problems in this photograph were with the wind and also judging how much to let the tree in the background fall out of focus. I wanted to show the tree to have ferns I didn't want the tree to be in focus so that the fern in the foreground stood out more. In the end I took a couple of shots and I've still to develop the one with slighly more depth of field.

A bit further around the walk we met up with a gentleman who had just been on a course with Ian Cameron. He used to be a rescue helicopter pilot and we talked about how his unique vantage point gave showed him different possibilities. He was taking a picture of the Pap which I was later to attempt myself a coupe of days later but he also told us that there was a Fly Agaric mushroom just around the corner that was particularly photogenic. Well we didn't find the particular mushroom he talked about (he showed us a photograph of it) but we did find the one on the right.

Now this was a photographic challenge as I was determined to capture the mushroom with a good amount of context, in this case the small pier, the trees and the lake. In order to do so, I had to have my camera at ground level (which meant no tripod) and in order to get an appropriately sized mushroom, I had to use the 80mm lens at a distance of about 8 inches. The photograph at the bottom shows the setup. Trying to focus and then insert a quickload without disturbing the whole lot was a nightmare. It's fortunate that my wife is so patient as I was there for about an hour (and I pinched the book she was reading to prop up the camera). Another issue that I had to remember was that with so much rear tilt, the bottom half of the picture needed compensating for bellows factor differently than the top of the picture. This was simple enough to work out by using a 'quick disc' style calculation which showed an extra half a stop was needed for the bottom, hence I added half a stop of extra grad to the top.

The result isn't something I would think of as 'my kind of photography' but I like it never the less.

On the Tuesday of our holiday in Glencoe, all of us (me, Charlotte and my Mum and Dad) decided to walk up the Glencoe valley from Clachaig all the way up past the old road. The day wasn't particularly good weather for vistas so my Dad and I walked over to the river coe and wandered around, me taking detail shots and my dad experimenting with long exposures of the waterfalls around the area.

I was looking at an area of strange geology near the edge if the river which I think is the edge of a magma intrusion where the existing rocks have been changed by the heat and the pressure into new rock types. The particular area I was looking at was obviously once a sedimentary composition of older volcanic materials and has many different colours which were brought out by Velvia, from greens to purples.

During our walk up the Glencoe valley, we decided to take a walk down to the river at the upper part of the valley. There is no official access to this part of the valley but if you're happy walking up the road a bit and crossing over the road barrier then you'll experience an area of Glencoe that is more like it was before all of the tourists arrived. Because it is at the top of the valley, it receives less light and more moisture which means it is lush, incredibly lush. Also, river here is more like the Etive in that it as the same mixture of hard green and pink rocks into which the river cuts twisting gorges.

I hung off the edge of one of these gorges and tried to capture some of the colours and the deep azure of the water. This particular picture used the largest amount of perspective correction I have ever used in order to adjust the perspective of the picture. As I pointed the camera down, the waterfall at the top was stretched vertically as it was on the edge of the picture (this is the effect that stretches peoples faces if they are on the edge of a wide angle picture). Because I wanted the rock protrusion to be the dominant part of the picture, I pointed the camera at the waterfall and then used front fall to bring the view downward. This made the waterfall undistorted and stretched the protrusion. The effect isn't huge but I think it balanced the picture better.

As we had my Mum and Dad up I wanted to show them Richard Child's gallery in Oban, being as it has to be one of the top five landscape photography galleries in Europe - a totally uninformed statistic but I have a feeling it has to be true ;-)

Anyway .. we went to the gallery to see Richard's artwork and to say hello. Richard has done an amazing job setting up the gallery and I would highly recommend anyone in the area go see it (and hopefully buy something!).

After saying hello, we went over to Easdale's slaty beach to capture some coastal rays and to browse around for shots. My Dad and I kept finding square and triangular holes in the slate and spent some time trying to work out where they had come from (triangular worms??) and eventually we found out that the slate was embedded with iron pyrites! As we wandered around the beach we found large swathes of coastal slate studded with protruding fools good. Obviously this couldn't go without an attempt at a photograph.

I knew the bright blue sky would cast an intense blue onto the transparency and left the shot unfiltered. The setup was a little hairy (dangling in approaching water, see picture) but eventually I fired off a couple of shots and we drove back to Glencoe as the weather was closing in..

Here's the picture and a shot of me taking it (taken with my iPhone to record time and date and gps position)

We've all done it. We know the location from a thousand photographs and we're hoping to see something new that will say something different about the location. And if any location epitomises this, Lochan Na h'Achlaise must be up near the top of the list. The classic shot is of that certain tree, typically shot with the Black Mount in the background and with the reflected sunrise and morning mists.. I was hoping to make something more of some of these different aspects, especially the mist, colour of light and the rocks exposed because of the shallow water. I'd convinced my Dad to come with me (despite many complaints about the early hour) and I was hoping he would see some of the amazing sights I think a lot of us have experienced there..

So, we're up in the early hours and I take my dad over to the obvious location to take some shots and whilst he is shooting away, I start to find a composition out of the group of rocks at the foot of 'that tree'. The technical setup is really simple with my 240 Fujinon A; f/16 for 1s and a few degrees of back tilt.

One of things about Lochan Na h'Achlaise is that there is a particular pattern to the light and mist (at least every time I've been there). Firstly, the mist is in clumps, clinging to the islands before the sun rises. At this time the water is incredibly still. As the sun begins to rise, the mist moves around a little, still with totally clear sections here and there. After a while the movement starts to create texture on the water. Very soon after this the mist starts to spread and that is the end of the totally clear sections. From now on the mist spreads out and thins and the colour of the light declines. Minutes later and the sun rises and starts to warm the land, the mist rises a lot and there is no chance of really great photos. This mist is then around for the next 20-30 mins and will only clear once the sun comes up. What you have is a window of opportunity of about 15 mins before and 15 minutes after sunrise where the air is still, the mist is playing niceley and the colour is at a peak. Most people arrive at the lochan just after this.

So I knew I only had a few moments to get another shot and the tree was looking so inviting and from the angle I was at, I could see the islands behind the tree being hidden in the mist. Soo... I said what the hell. I'll take a go at it.. On goes the my Nikkor 360 T-ED and f/32 for a second .. The results are embarrasingly good (not as in it's amazing but that I'd like to show it off but it is that tree! ah well, I'm sure I can cope). So .. here it is..

and a couple of pictures of my camera taking these :-)