Composition Challenge

Tim Parkin

Tim Parkin is a landscape photographer living in Scotland who co-founded On Landscape magazine. Alongside his photography and writing he also co-founded the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, runs a film scanning business and is a judge for other international landscape and nature competitions.

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Whilst planning the September board meeting for On Landscape and a planning meeting for the conference we decided that another office based discussion could be avoided by hiring a cottage in the Peak District for a few days and combining the event with a bit of photography, food and drink. On the final day we paid a visit to the top end of Padley Gorge and I challenged Joe Cornish, David Ward and myself to find three or four photographs but with the proviso that they all had to include a particular, famous Padley tree as a significant compositional element. How did we get on? Read about it below.

Joe Cornish at work by David Ward

David Ward

I often set participants on my workshops the task of only making one image in twenty minutes. Of course to a large format photographer this seems unduly hasty; indeed, four or five images in a day seems pretty rapid shooting to me. On this occasion I was using a Fuji XE-1, a camera that positively encourages faster working. Nevertheless I tried my best to avoid a reckless use of pixels. So, when Tim suggested that Joe, he and I spend one hour making four images of just one tree I felt quite at home. Although I did resist the urge to punch the air and cry, “Yes!”