Join the conversation
Subcribe to comment rss feedStruck down by the lergy!
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.
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!!