January 2011, already?

Hello! Sorry I've not been in for a while - it's been all go round here for the last few months. Especially, since November, when Jo and I left the studio in Oulton, and split the various services of the company up to make it easier to promote each one. I'm working from home and specialising in weddings now, and loving it. Here's something I was musing about on one of my other blogs, but I suddenly remembered this one and it seems to fit a little better on this one!

There are some things that remind me why my job is the best in the world, and that I am incredibly lucky to be doing it. Often it's the loveliness of the people I get to work with, and the satisfaction I get from doing a good job for them. I get to see people at their best, celebrating their happiest times, and sharing the experience with the people they love. It's a priviledge to be asked to record the pictorial memories. But every so often I remember how much of a kick I get just from the process of using the camera.

Yesterday, I woke up from a dream in which I was using my very first camera, the one I bought when I was working for a year in the USA, after my A-Levels. For the first time, at the age of 19, I had money, spare time, and a whole new country of things to photograph. I saved up $500 and bought a Pentax K-1000, a 50mm, a 28-70mm macro and a 70-200mm lens, a Tamrac camera bag, and a few other things, all 2nd hand. Then I set about using about 3 rolls of films a week and enrolled in evening classes in SLR cameras and basic darkroom techniques. It got me hooked and made me reconsider my future. I scrapped the journalism degree I was enrolled in for when I got back to the UK, and decided to do a BTEC ND in Photomedia at Art College instead. I learned how to make the machinery of the camera capture things on film the way I wanted it to. Every time you took a photo with that camera, you had to balance and control the light to get it right. It fascinated me, and throughout college and into my photography degree, I shot with film in that camera.

I stayed loyal to Pentax and film, upgrading to an automatic Mz5N for my final projects at Uni, until 2005, when it became obvious that I had to go digital along with the rest of the world, and when I was first shooting freelance, it was with a Nikon D70s. The change was incredible, allowing so much more control, variation of ISO from shot to shot, and greater precision of exposure. The camera was so clever that you could tell it to automatically set the other factor of the exposure value for either the shutter speed or the aperture you were using. My K-1000 is sitting in a box in the spare room. I've not even developed the last few rolls I shot with my Mz5N. And it's not until now that I've missed the way I used to work.

So yesterday morning, I set the controls on the Nikon D300 to manual focus, and manual exposure control, although working on spot metering mode to cope with the sun which was bright and low above the river, and went out to walk through Kirkstall Abbey into the woods along the River as it flows towards Leeds, stopping with my tripod wherever I found something interesting to look at. I'm not one for rules, so I was shooting into the sun, getting sunflares and long shadows, capturing the frost blooms on feathers and leaves, and I was exploring a new path that's just been laid into a part of the woods I'd never been in before, and it offers some lovely locations for portraiture. I fed ducks, I walked along the river, I was shooting just for the fun of it in total control of the camera. In other words, I was in my element! I was surprised when I edited them how little I needed to do.

Technological advances have given even small cameras the ability to produce good results, and everyone has the opportunity to record the episodes of life in so much more detail. It's easy, however, to allow the camera to take over the more routine functions, especially when you're using it every day for work, in fast moving and challenging conditions. Taking the control back has allowed me to refresh a few old skills and test myself in a few difficult practical situations.

When something catches my eye, I use the camera to point out exactly what it is that I saw. My work benefits from being able to do far more than rely on what the camera tells me to do. I can tell the camera what I want people to see and how I want it to capture it, and that's what I'm paid to do, and have been for the last 4 years.