The eyes have it!
I was reading an article recently about how to use Photoshop. It was explaining how to include rays of light, a moon in a night sky, add a rainbow, paint in a sunset, build a scene from scratch and remove unwanted distractions and more! I wondered at the end of it, just how real are some of the images that feature so prominently as examples of landscape photography? It begs the question whether we should attempt to record what we see in our own special way, or whether we should create what we think others would like to see? My personal preference is to record what I see, rather than to create a Walt Disney or Pixar type fantasy image. Photos that you will see in my portfolio, whilst adjusted from RAW files in the main, perhaps cropped to isolate features or zoomed with a telephoto lens, are all authentic attempts to portray reality in the best light.
I was just a young kid when I took my first photographs; probably around age 9 or 10. My early photos were very disappointing. What could I expect after my first photo session using a cheap toy camera? I did however, learn a lot about positioning subjects within a frame and was able to see past the blurred, awful results, to a future that could only produce something better!
My first real camera, acquired during my early teens, was a 35mm Agfa Karat, having a lens that popped out on a bellows arrangement and a shutter that had to be cocked before being released. I had great fun, shooting mostly black and white film, which I later developed and printed myself. I learned a great deal with that camera, especially about the problems associated with parallax error!
The development of my photography was slowed somewhat during my student days. A lack of funds and full-time study meant that I had to wait a considerable time before I owned my first SLR, a Minolta SRT 101, with a 50 mm f/1.4 lens. I upgraded in 1987 to a Minolta 9000 with a 28-85 mm zoom lens; back then a brilliant setup! The 9000 eventually failed to operate at the turn of the century, due to an irreplaceable (according to the agent) shutter-release switch. A replacement camera was essential.
Early digital photography just didn’t match the results of film; many of us never believed that it would! Some brave souls were however, transitioning to the new medium and were off-loading their old analogue equipment. To my delight I happened upon a used (and cheap) Minolta 7000i with a 28-135 mm zoom lens, a lens that is still my favourite workhorse; it really is a superb piece of engineering and, apart from some very annoying lens flare when pointed towards the sun, it gives me great results at all focal lengths (you may or may not agree if you look at some of the images in my portfolio).
Technology advances exponentially and now I doubt whether anyone could seriously suggest that the results to be obtained from film are any match for those from a digital camera. My first digital camera was a little Olympus Stylus 410. It was amazing to be able to shoot indefinitely, storing media on a card the size of a postage stamp, being able to store the camera in the pocket of a jacket or pair of trousers and not having to endure that painful wait for the results to come back from the processing company!
Digital photography is terrific, but it seems that if we buy a camera one day, it is obsolete the next. How many functions do we need? How much cleverer than us does a camera need to be? Have we lost sight of how a photograph is actually formed? Where will it end? I have a cupboard full of cameras now, but still think that there may be just one more! It is the person behind the lens that matters, not the camera. If you don’t see the picture in front of you, the camera will not see it for you!
I have over 71,000 images taken since I have owned a digital camera. On a separate hard drive I have the scans of my entire negative and slide collection, over 13,000 images. I admit that I find it very hard to discard an image once I have taken it, unless it is entirely useless or a near duplicate of a better shot. This website allows me to answer the question that I am so often asked, “What are you going to do with all those photographs?” It is my hope that some of them will be seen long after I have pressed the shutter for the last time, so I am putting a selection out there, for all to see, to appraise, criticise, perhaps learn from and hopefully, to enjoy.
Finally, I was subjected to a veiled criticism recently. Someone complained about the number of tourists who are constantly taking photographs of antiquities, locations (I do a lot of that) and themselves, without seeming to actually take the time to be in the moment, to see and to understand what they are looking at. I have heard the criticism many times, from other sources, but I think that the people making the criticism are missing the point. To take a photograph, the person taking the photograph has a reason for doing so. It is precisely because they understand what they are looking at that they attempt to record it. Enjoyment is derived again, later and repeatedly. One of the great joys of photography is to be at one with the image, to recall the moment and to own in some small way a part of the world that surrounds us, to know by looking at the image that we were the ones who recorded it, we saw it and yes, we were there! I would argue that a good photographer is actively engaged with the subject of the image and actually sees more than the casual observer.
The eyes have it!
Steve Roden 2017