How many times have you said to yourself “oh I should have brought a camera”, or maybe “I should really take a photo of this”? My advice – bring the camera, and take the photo. Whatever it is, and however bad it is. The camera can just be your phone, which probably means you have it with you anyway, and the photograph need not be an award winning shot, it need not even be particularly interesting. But whatever it is of, and no matter how good or bad it is, it will be a historical record, a document of that moment in your life. And at some stage in the future, you may be glad of it. Or perhaps even more importantly, someone else may be glad of it. Someone who wasn’t there at the time, for instance. Possibly even someone who hasn’t been born yet.
Over the course of this A to Z series, I hope to introduce beginner photographers to maybe four concepts that they can use to improve the standard of their photography practically over night. The first of those comes in this, part 2 of 26, as we hit the letter B, and share a visual conversation about the often overlooked part of the photograph – the background.
I can barely remember the last time I got to take my camera out to capture a landscape photograph, so when I found myself passing close to Termonfeckin beach in Louth the other day, and with all of about five minutes to spare, I decided to take a short diversion off the motorway to go and see if I could find a photograph. The light wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. And the camera I had in the boot of the car was my Fuji X100, so in theory, at least, it should have been up to the job. It was.
My favourite maths teacher in secondary school introduced me to the concept of a mnemonic. For those of you who don’t know, a mnemonic is basically where you use an easy-to-remember word or phrase as a prompt for something harder to remember. I think one of Mr. O’Brien’s ones was “Soh Cah Toa”. (Can you tell what it is yet?). I’m sure he didn’t invent that particular one, or indeed any of the ones he told us about, but as the person who introduced me to the whole concept, I’ll always think about him when I come across a mnemonic. Which is why, during a photography seminar last Sunday, Mr. O’Brien popped into my head. Which brings me nicely to the question I’m sure you’re asking: “Who’s Roger, and what’s this about a giant pear?”
The video above is one you might have seen already in the last couple of days, because it’s doing the rounds on the web. But if you haven’t it’s worth 4 minutes of your time, because in the week when Kodak filed for bankruptcy, this forward-looking video from 2006, which, in an amusing way, predicts with amazing accuracy all the things that would bring about the demise of the company, is, as Alanis Morrisette might say, ironic. I am a digital photographer, but my first steps into photography back in my early teens were, obviously, film based and more often than not I used Kodak film. It served me well up to the early part of the last decade in fact. Back then my photos were developed by whatever photo shop or pharmacy was nearby – in one hour if I was feeling rich, or in 24 or 48 hours if I was feeling patient. They were snaps and nothing more, and the concept of cropping was alien to me, so when Kodak brought out the Advantix technology ridiculed in the film above back in 1996 I enjoyed the novelty of getting to choose the aspect ratio of the photo as I shot it. It further engaged my interest in photography, and in its own way helped to cement my determination to take and share pictures. It was a crude way of taking pictures that didn’t look like everyone else’s, for instance. When you start managing to do that, well then you want to take more pictures that don’t look like everyone else’s. It’s like a first step in finding your photographic eye. I hope to root out some examples over the weekend if I can find them, and will share a few here if I do.
Recent Comments