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Tim Parkin
Tim Parkin is a British landscape photographer, writer, and editor best known as the co-founder of On Landscape magazine, where he explores the art and practice of photographing the natural world. His work is thoughtful and carefully crafted, often focusing on subtle details and quiet moments in the landscape rather than dramatic vistas. Alongside his photography and writing, he co-founded the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, serves as a judge for other international competitions. Through all these projects, Parkin has become a respected and influential voice in contemporary landscape photography.
It’s been a good year so far, especially if you’re a flu virus! Over here in the UK, the flu jab is normally formulated to give some protection against the most common/virulent flu strains and distributed in September/October. Unfortunately, this year it was too late to protect against a mutation (H3N2 "subclade K" ask SUPER FLU!) which meant there was a load of very virulent virii floating around the Highlands.
So, as the back half of March arrived, I went down hard with a most heinous dose of Man Flu™. Normally, I’d take a couple of days doing some easy work to recover, but this knocked me out for a solid week. I managed to nip out on a couple of days to get a photo, but I instead spent a lot of time looking through old pictures of my own and also trying find old landscape photographs of the Lochaber area**. Whilst I was doing so, I rediscovered the work of George Washington Wilson. I’d seen some of his work while visiting the Bradford National Science and Media Museum (formerly The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television/The National Media Museum) where we launched On Landscape in 2011 (So long ago!!). As you may have seen in this month's editorial, I found a load of better-scanned, high-resolution photographs in the Aberdeen University Library archive (his home town) and had a bit of fun restoring them and colourising a couple. I’ll be writing an article about his in a future issue.
When I wasn’t holed up in bed, we had some great days out with the camera, which brought up another frustrating aspect of 365 projects. When you do have a good day out, such as a couple of walks up to the North Face of Ben Nevis we had, you can end up with a load of really interesting photos, but then you can only share one of them per day! I must admit to using two photos from one of the Ben Nevis walks to fill in a day I missed while I was ill! Sue me!!