I’ve been meaning to write an introduction for a while, having been on board good ship Holgablog for about 8 months now. You’ll have to excuse me wittering on a bit. I don’t get out much…
It’s my Dad’s fault I’m into photography, I think. 1985. Still innocent. My first camera is 110 format (although I don’t know that at the time). I take pictures of ducks and fountains and other things I haven’t seen before. Not so much the rule of Thirds, more the rule of ‘Stick Everything Right At The Centre’. The rate of failure is pretty high and blurry, but I don’t particularly care.
Moving on a bit. Teenage years, I borrow my Dad’s Minolta SLR. School has a darkroom and it’s cool and quiet in there. I shoot 35mm black and white. I try to learn about developing and enlarging. Somehow I get a week’s work at ‘Amateur Photographer’ magazine. I take pictures of the moon, and fences, and horse races. I start noticing the odd photo I actually quite like, but it still seems like luck.
1998. University. I have an APS camera and take blurry photos of drunk people.
2003. For some reason, I go back to the SLR again. I figure out how depth of focus works and start picking my shots better. I get given a low-budget, but functional digital camera, and for the first time I can see what the camera sees. It goes round Europe with me and my girlfriend and I take far too many photos.
2005, and life cycles round again. I go back to Uni. I pick up a Nikon DSLR and start posting to Flickr, where they have things like “Lomo” groups and all kinds of bat-crazy cameras. Ebay beckons, and I get sucked in. I start out carefully – a half-broken LC-A and, a little later, a Holga GCFN. Wow, square format! I take photos of abstract shapes and pretty colours.
The slope gets more slippery. Some old TLRs, some vintage cameras, an LC-A that works, and a film scanner. My girlfriend gives me a Diana+ and a Golden Half, and I have to start storing everything in little hidey-holes around the house. I take photos of wherever I happen to be at the time. I take 3 cameras on holiday, and buy 3 more out there. I still take too many photos.
2010. Where am I now? I seem to have a love of weird cameras. I feel an urge to experiment more – the phrase that sticks in my head is “most people have never even got the most out of a box camera”. I want imagination. I want photography to lead me to places I wouldn’t normally go. I am fascinated by simplicity, by “slow” photography. I upgrade my DSLR as well as buying a “new” 1930s box camera. I find myself wanting to get up before dawn to go and shoot it with a £30 plastic camera. Success is still luck, but I’m getting luckier.
I no longer know where the “goodness” of a photo comes from. Is it the camera? Is it the lens? The subject? The viewer? Maybe it’s all of these, and more. Each moment is captured by hardware wielded by wetware and wrung through software. Each moment contains an infinity of photos, and each photo has an infinity of interpretations.
Everything is unique.
More…
Flickr
My Four Corners Dark story
