Much mention of equipment here, but that’s little surprise in this place. Though we do need equipment - without it we couldn’t do anything.
As a child, mechanical devices, including cameras, evoked a certain fascination. But my knowledge of them, and any attendant processes, was very scanty. And our photographic ‘seeing’ can have a history of its own ...
Long pre-internet, photographic reproductions were most widely seen in books, newspapers and family albums. Mostly in monochrome, all taken using film, and usually pretty poorly conceived and reproduced.
But colour was on the march! Colour slide film, having little latitude, required some sort of meter. In my mid-teens I got a match-needle 35mm rangefinder camera of Japanese make with a programmed shutter (you couldn’t vary aperture and shutter-speed independently). Film was sent to a lab for processing.
In late teens, I ventured to get a 10-yr old manual 35mm slr body – waist-level finder. I had no darkroom experience, and had been drawn to colour anyway, thinking it ‘modern’, I suppose, whilst still being mostly unaware of monochrome’s artistic potential. I paired that body with a 90mm click-stop lens – not even a preset, let alone an auto-aperture one. But with my eye still pressed against the magnifier in the viewfinder hood, I developed the knack after focussing wide-open, of rotating the aperture ring with one finger, counting the clicks to the wanted aperture before pressing the shutter.
Colour film of any type tended to be on the slow side, so even daylight exposures were constrained – outdoors you were fighting against enough stop-down to give decent depth of field and enough shutter-speed to diminish camera shake – a compromise all round. (I hadn’t yet appreciated shallow depth of field as a compositional tool.)
The 90mm was maybe a quirky choice to be my ‘standard’. But I was engaging with framing the shot in camera and getting the exposure right. So I carried on, using slide film mainly, for years.
At length an eye-level slr with a built-in meter came along, but I’d say that there was little further vision. I was still a snap-shooter, if a conscientious one. Though aware of light to some degree, essentially I was taking scenes, or ‘things’.
But over time, the nature of my attention to what’s out there got good enough in a humble way to enlarge and share. The digital age had begun, and I was using a film scanner to digitise colour slides with Windows 98, Photoshop 5 (that’s pre CS, never mind CC) and a crt monitor, and sending files on cd for print with instruction to the lab to ‘print as sent, without intervention’. And I got back what I’d achieved on screen. (The scanner had far more megapixels than the dslr’s of the day.)
But the internet had already dawned, and was extending its tentacles. With Google as your friend, you could become exposed to what seemed like the whole history of photography as well as what people were doing now.
And the tech was improving too, so in 2013 I gave in and got a 2007 dslr. Poorer people have to run to keep up, you see, even if they stay the same number of steps behind. It had more megapixels than the film scanner, but a dynamic range akin to slide film.
Making images seems unstoppable (it isn’t, of course – you could just walk away, turn your back on it – you’d still have a life). But it’s something to keep exploring. A mix of curiosity, cumulative experience and awareness of the work of others keeps me going. I’m still learning (it never stops, until your final decline).
I’ve exhibited in several places (solo show). Time to make submissions again – time flies. I’m updating my portfolio (A3 prints). Designed and had printed a book, and gave them away to friends. Time to do another.
So it goes. An escape? No, it’s part of life.
