A serious accident eventually turned Tim Parkin towards landscape photography. He tells CHARLES HUTCHINSON how getting better made him look at life differently.

IT was the day of the England-Spain quarter-final at Euro 96. Tim Parkin had invited friends around to watch the football and needed to adjust his TV reception.

“I was outside on a security grill window, holding on to a pair of pliers, and I had this sudden realisation I wasn’t holding on to the grill,” says Tim.

He fell backwards, heavily.

“I walked back into the house, got into the bath… and couldn’t get out again.”

It turned out he had broken his back in the fall. Rushed from Manchester General to Salford Royal with an escort of three police cars, Tim had to make a choice: a year in traction or a 14-hour operation.

Tim chose the latter. One vertebra was removed, three were fused together and a titanium cage with a couple of steel bolts was inserted in his body. It would be three years before he could go out to work again.

“I wasn’t even that interested in football,” he says now. “It was my friends that really wanted to watch the match.”

The accident was a life-changing moment for Tim, who at the time was an electrical engineer and computational mathematics lecturer at UMIST. Eventually he became a photographer, and now his first solo exhibition of landscape photography and nature’s textures can be seen at Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole.

“On doctor’s advice, I started walking for therapy and discovered a love of the natural world, which I felt inspired to capture on film,” says Tim, who lives in Burnby, near Pocklington.

Working primarily from his Yorkshire Wolds home, Tim photographs North and East Yorkshire with forays into the Lake District and Scotland, resulting in his Elemental exhibition.

First, however, he recalls his accident.

“I can remember I was well into shock by the time I was escorted to Salford Royal. It’s an extraordinarily odd feeling in that pain reaches a certain threshold and then becomes less,” he says.

The operation went well – the consultant said it was the best he had ever done in such circumstances – but Tim was told it would take two-and-a-half years to recover fully.

He acquired a cat for company, named Stanley after wizard of the wing Sir Stanley Matthews, in honour of Tom’s Stoke-on-Trent roots. But his brain was restless as his body healed.

He had been studying for his PhD in computational mathematics at the time of his accident, as well being a lecturer and an engineer whose design skills were used in fighter jets. New technology was to be his stimulus.

“As part of my role at university, I’d seen the precursor to the internet, the Joint Academic Network, or Janet for short, so while I was recuperating I taught myself how to do websites. That was really good timing,” says Tim, whose first job on his return to work was as the assistant head of the web for Sporting Life in Leeds.

Further web jobs followed before he set up his own web company, Pollenation Internet. He also moved to Yorkshire from South Manchester after meeting his wife, Charlotte, in Leeds.

Yorkshire has been his home ever since, and as his walking trips flourished in the broad acres, so did his love of landscape photography that had begun in his late 30s.

Come his 40th birthday, his family gave Tim the present of a trip to the Outer Hebrides for workshops with the photographer David Ward.

“Until then I’d been taking photographs digitally, but on the courses up there he was using large-format cameras, and eight out of ten people there had them too,” he says.

This was to be another life-changing moment: his conversion from new technology to the old one beloved by early Victorian photographers, who had found the results to be reminiscent of paintings.

“The main drawback to large format is the cameras; they’re huge and take time setting up,” says Tim. “It’s impossible to pop one in your back pocket and snap hundreds of pictures a day.”

And so Tim joined the brigade of old-school photographers with a tripod and a rucksack to carry 40lbs of cameras and 3½ kilogram lenses, but the weight and the wait are worth it, he reckons.

“It was seeing the results that convinced me. I realised the large format camera produced better shots that are artistic,” says Tim.

“Instead of a hundred photographs in a day, I’ve discovered great satisfaction from finding one or two compositions. I’ll spend all day setting up to take just one perfect natural shot.”

This “slow cooking-style” form of photography at £8 a shot allows Tim to engage with landscapes. “It comes from acute observation and mindfulness,” he says. “You choose what image to take and what not to take, whereas digitally you’re abrogating that choice.”

Tim wants to spread the gospel of the large-format camera, and four years ago he and photographer Joe Cornish launched On Landscape, the only online landscape photography magazine in the world.

“It’s important that I can share my work, but above all I want people who love the natural world and landscape photography to be able to take better pictures,” says Tim.

Tim is organising the first On Landscape photography conference at the Rheged Centre, in Penrith, Cumbria, from November 21 to 23, featuring international photographers.

“It’s the culmination of my ambition. One I could only have ever dreamed of when I fell and broke my back all those years ago,” he says.

In the meantime, the Elemental show presents a cross-section of Tim’s photography through the years with 26 on show, all for sale in print editions, some at £100, three large ones at £500.

“I’ve called it Elemental for several reasons,” he says. “A lot of the photographs I take have a connection with dreamscapes: an abstracted view of a real landscape that takes on an almost fairy-like quality. Then there’s the ‘spirit’ meaning of elemental and the elemental forces of nature – fire, water, air and earth – and the way our mythology connects with nature, such as the Druid connection with trees.”

View his exhibition and you will see the nature boy is in his element.

• Tim Parkin: Elemental runs at The Gallery, Ryedale Folk Museum, Hutton-le-Hole, until March 23. Opening hours: 10am to 4.30pm; admission free. Tim will give a talk at the museum on March 13 at 2pm.