In the end it turned out that the camera hadn't been working properly and none of the photos came out. But, such had been the deliberation in deciding what pictures to take I realised that all of these images were firmly lodged in my head and from then on decided to make a virtue of my tight arsedness by asserting that the looking was more important than the taking. I'd back this up with the tale of a Japanese colleague's son who was a proper photographer. he'd just spent three days standing by a waterfall in Yosemite National Park and at the end of that period used his 70mm Hasselblad to take just two photographs; one of them being a spare in case the other hadn't worked. He knew what he wanted and was prepared to wait.
As someone who spends what many would consider an inordinate amount of time wandering or cycling about the place and just looking, I began, after many years, to feel the urge to capture some of my favourite scenes if not for anyone else's consumption then my own. The big challenge being how to capture extensive landscapes on film (a squeomorph if ever there was). Hence, I finally got around to buying a decent quality digital camera.
The first photo with the new camera
This first photo was taken sat at the kitchen table. A revealing tableau of domestic life in a scruffy household.
Heavy seas the day after the highest tide for 60 years.
We went to Malta in the summer, out of curiosity and to visit a cousin who lives there, but didn't take a camera. This astonished the cousin who, when he was about to take us to visit a coastal feature called the Azure Window (a natural stone arch that you can look through to see the sea), couldn't really see the point of going if you weren't going to take a picture. How will you share the experience with your friends?
By sending them this link, that's how.
Interesting. Of course, the other side of the argument is that most people look plenty but can't really see, and a camera can be a valuable aid on that particular road to enlightenment. Though a pencil and paper will do the job, too. Eyes, unaided, are very bad at seeing (just as ears are pretty poor at listening).
ReplyDeleteThough the urge to snap away as a substitute for being there is very wicked, of course. I love watching a tourist using an iPad as a camera.
I think the difference is between making a picture of something, and making a picture from something. Get the hang of the latter, and you may even find yourself feeling naked without that camera...
Mike
Mike
DeleteMy ciliary muscles aren't flattening my lenses well enough any more to get clear distance vision. So I've been wearing my glasses a lot more. These can't help but frame what I'm looking at. Perhaps its becoming aware of this that's drawing me back to photography.
And you're right, Eyes give clues about what's out there and the rest of the brain interprets them as it sees fit. When teaching I couldn't help but demonstrate the blind spot (when the image falls on the departing optic nerve) or hold my thumb out at arms length and say something like "the image of your thumb nail just about covers the most sensitive part of your retina (the fovea) and so that's the only bit of the overall image that's really in sharp focus.You're making the rest up".
The most amusing one, for me, was getting them to poke themselves gently in the side of the eye (through the eye lid) and see the image from that eye rotate. This demonstrates that the brain doesn't have sensors to tell it which way the eye is pointing (and thereby be able to stabilise the image when the eye rotates in its socket) but simply uses the instructions it sends to the eye itself (if it thinks it told it to rotate in that way then it assumes that it has).
In theory, I get the of from distinction . In practice, we'll have to wait and see..
Digital cameras are a big help in this, because you can look at the 2-D image, rather than through a viewfinder into a 3-D world. It's a great learning aid (and unlike a view camera it's not upside-down and back-to-front!).Translating 3-D into 2-D is a large part of the art of making pictures -- your "trees" Google icon is a successful 2-D image, whereas your "kitchen" shot is not, unless I just want to know what your kitchen looks like. The "heavy seas" could be nice, considerably enlarged, but there's a lot of "dead" space not doing much work.
ReplyDeleteMike
Sadly the trees, from up Whisperdale, are no longer there and I think that the bike, which must be in there somewhere, got nicked. "The kitchen" was just press the button for the first time and see what happens; Though I do like the light at that time of day. The heavy seas are just heavy seas.
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