Dalt Quarry – A Compositional Study

Tim Parkin

Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.

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The act of finding and constructing a composition is one that struggles to be pinned down. The way each photographer manages this is often quite different and to generalise about the ‘best’ way is a pointless task. However, a single photographer can describe how they go about approaching a particular area and then possibly document the way that a potential composition reveals itself. There are then all of the framing decisions about edges, corners and flow that can be discussed and finally a discussion of how to emphasis some of these featured in post processing. And then, perhaps if a few different photographers were to do this, we might find a few commonalities - even if not I hope that the experience of reading about such a process might provide a few areas for experimentation.

To this end, whilst I was in Borrowdale in the Lake District last year, I decided to document the area I was hoping to take a picture for just such an article. Those photographs have stayed on my hard drive for 12 months until the final picture was included in my recent exhibition. I hope you’ll find the exercise interesting and please let us know if you’d like to see more of these from myself or other photographers.