Tim Platt
For Tim, photography is above all about the simple joy of seeing. After over 25 years of experience delivering international advertising campaigns for global brands like Unilever, P&G, Samsung, LG, Britvic and GSK among many others, Tim has mastered the craft and technique required at the highest echelons of commercial photography. He has always combined these commissions with developing his personal creative work. This includes a fascination with animal portraiture and the way that photography allows us to both observe and marvel at the world in suspension, in myriad levels of detail.
He runs his own studio in central London, and divides his time between London and Norfolk where he and his family have now enjoyed living in Norwich for 15 years. He believes that although craft and technique should not be underestimated, a mysterious neural connection between the eye and the brain makes great images, and technique should remain safely behind the scenes. Nowhere does this connection matter more than when an image is framed on a wall, where it will be enjoyed for many years to come.
He recently won first place in the Fine Art/ Abstract category in the International Photography Awards 2022 for his Botanical Opticals project.
Multimedia exhibition at the Crypt Gallery, Norwich.
Being interested in both stills and motion led him recently to explore the world of botanical time-lapse, which is essentially a stills process that becomes a video in post-production. Plants and flowers are photographed over long periods while they grow or bloom. This process creates thousands of high-resolution stills which are then animated at different speeds to reveal a secret life that we don't normally see. He started to arrange these clips into symmetrical patterns and realised that the effects can be quite mesmerising.
These ideas developed into an interactive iOS relaxation app he created called Moodlapse. The user taps, slides, and tilts the screen to create beautiful kaleidoscopic videos of flowers blooming. These moving patterns combine with soothing ambient binaural music to help stimulate different brainwave frequencies and promote relaxation and a sense of wellbeing.
The Botanical Opticals series of both stills, and a unique audiovisual installation at the Crypt exhibition in Norwich, evolved from ideas explored during the development of Moodlapse.
Tim says:
“This collection is based on my recent exploration of shooting botanical time-lapse videos of flowers blooming. I am interested in how time-lapse reveals the hidden world of ’slow’ time by effectively speeding up the transformations created by natural phenomena around us. Our perception of real-time is governed by what we can see actually happening before us. However, we either take for granted or seldom think about many natural phenomena, such as plants growing or flowers blooming, because we don’t notice these transformations happening. Time-lapse telescopes a lengthy passage of time to show us what is happening and to become more mindful of a natural world that is slowly and continually changing all around us.
Blog post about the Botanical Opticals show