Photographer’s new book a tribute to Marin
If you’re a budding photographer, there are worse places to live than Marin County, with its sweeping hills and abundant wildlife. But taking a good photo isn’t as intuitive as you’d expect.
Tim Walker has some tips.
“It’s not that complicated,” said the Novato photographer. “There’s not really a big difference from what you’re probably doing without thinking about it that much. With just a couple little tweaks, it could be that much better, right?”
“Picture Marin,” Walker’s new compendium of photos taken around Marin County, also features tips geared toward beginning photographers.
“I knew I had a bunch of photos, and I was thinking about doing a sort of coffee-table book,” Walker said. “And then as I got into it a little more, I felt like it might be worthwhile to make photography seem more accessible than maybe people think it is.”
Some of Walker’s tips are more technical, like memorizing the knobs and buttons on your camera by feel. Others are more abstract; for instance, Walker abhors photos of ducks.
“There’s just ducks everywhere, ducks every day, ducks, ducks, ducks,” he said. “It’s not that I dislike ducks. There’s a photo of a mallard in my book. It’s just that to me, they’re not that special, because they’re everywhere — they’re like crows, or buzzards.”
He also devotes a substantial portion of the book to taking pictures of the moon, that infamously photo-averse astronomical object that usually doesn’t look much more impressive than a streetlight in phone photos.
“I had never really tried taking pictures of the moon until I got this really long lens, and that makes all the difference in the world,” Walker said. “I put more effort into figuring out where I need to be to get the shot of it I want — if I want to see it coming out behind Coit Tower, or if I want to see it coming out from behind one of the towers of the bridge.”
If it seems like there are a lot of skills to internalize, it may be reassuring to learn that Walker himself came late to photography. Born and raised in Sonoma County, Walker spent much of his career working in corporate videography in the Sacramento area before moving to Marin with his wife in 2017, first to Sausalito and then to Novato.
“I remember especially just how many pelicans came so close to where we were living in Sausalito, and harbor seals,” he said. “I just thought, I really need to take some better pictures of these things.”
Walker began investing in camera equipment, and within just four years of picking up his new hobby, he had more than enough photos to put together a coffee-table book.
“One of the things that happened as I went along and I got more experienced was I was looking back at the photos and thinking, eh, that’s not so great,” Walker said. “I found myself taking photos of similar things and thinking this one is better than this one, and replacing them. So I ended up in this sort of iterative process while I was shooting.”
Though Walker initially had some “photos from elsewhere” he was proud of, his focus for the book eventually narrowed down to his home turf, which he felt provided more than enough compelling visual material for a book.
“At some point, it went from being just photos to a sort of photographic tribute to Marin County,” he said. “There’s a chapter with all the locations, suggestions for places you can go with little maps and things.”
To Walker, photography provides not only a way of preserving ephemeral moments or capturing natural beauty, but an entirely new way of seeing.
“If I took a walk five years ago and go on the same walk today, I’m going to see more things I would’ve missed before, that I would’ve walked right past,” he said. “(Photography) makes you aware that in any situation, there’s going to be more than meets the eye.”