Exposure in Leeds

Image (c) Tim Parkin

This week I dragged a friend to hear landscape photographer Tim Parkin speak at the Leeds photography network ExposureLeeds meeting. I say dragged - my friend loves photography, especially landscape, but he's been feeling a bit disillusioned lately and hasn't been taking many pictures. It probably didn't help that I probably bigged it up a bit too much and made it sound like a compulsory networking event, but fortunately he ignored me and succumbed to my additional bribe of cider and cake. Always a winner.

Tim Parkin comes across as a lovely, unassuming chap with a real and expert passion for his photography. As well as talking us through how he'd developed as a photographer, he'd also brought along his fabulously complicated looking large format camera (it's VERY different to digital, non-photography geeks). These things take an hour or so to set up to get the photo you want, but he demonstrated this so simply and clearly, he made even me (who gets intimidated by the vast majority of the functions on my single lens intermediate camera) want to go out and have a go.

Tim's a sneakily inspiring speaker - he clearly knows a lot about his craft, both technically and compositionally, but describes it in such a straightforward way, with subtle yet obvious passion, it feels like he's explaining it over a quiet pint in the pub, making it seem realistically achievable for you to develop your artistic streak to its maximum too. 

He certainly had this effect on myself, and my friend as well, who took it a step further and resolved to go out the next day (not having been out taking landscapes for a good six months) and put Tim's top tips on composition, colour and timing into practice: This is the result:

image (c) Malcolm F Stoney

Clicking the links below each image will show them a bit bigger and in a bit more glory on flickr.


Thanks Tim!

Have a look at: 
Tim Parkin's website

Tim Parkin's flickr

Malcolm F Stoney's flickr