Photography

Photography

My main hobby is photography, a hobby I began in earnest about 1970 (for those of you not familiar with Ernest, he's a small village near Zeal!). Back in those days, I did a lot of black-and-white photography, in fact, nearly all of it was, since it was the easiest and cheapest. I bought a second-hand enlarger, and enrolled in the photography class at the local adult education centre.

About 1971 (after quite a bit of soul-searching) I spent month's wages on a Praktica SLR camera made in East Germany. It seemed such an extravagant sum, but it was state-of-the-art, and cheaper than Japanese or West German alternatives. It had a decent large aperture lens, and through the lens metering. In those days, building cameras required a great deal of human input, and high precision. Shutter mechanisms for instance, were like a tiny gearbox, but more complex than a watch. It's easy to see where the money went.

Taking pictures involved focusing, and then adjusting the exposure by setting the required shutter speed for the job, and fine tuning by setting the aperture. It could be the other way round; you'd set the aperture and then adjust the speed, and in both cases what you were doing was lining a ring up with the meter needle (both seen through the viewfinder – an advanced feature in those days!).

No prizes for guessing that taking pictures was quite a slow process, there was a lot to do, and that was without framing the shot! I guess the speed that we worked at reflected the subjects that we tended to photograph. When speed was essential, perhaps at a sporting event, or air show, you had to be predictive, focusing and setting up exposures where you expected the action to be. A small aperture gave greater depth of field to offset focusing errors, this meant longer exposures, so you would try to use faster film, or uprate a slower film by developing longer.

Today, you can buy fully automatic digital cameras in a supermarket for £30 or less that take pictures instantly at the press of a button, and that rarely take a bad picture. Not only that, the pictures themselves cost nothing to take, whereas using film, you were reluctant to waste any, so many pictures were never taken.

For me though, the biggest gain in going digital is the ability to process pictures using Photoshop. It is a huge and comprehensive photo-manipulation package, limited only by one's ability, and imagination. Which means that I have tremendous room for improvement! Being somewhat useless when it comes to drawing or painting, using Photoshop, I am at least able to get one or two rungs up the ladder from the bottom in graphic arts!

I'll leave it there for now. No doubt, Photoshop will find itself covered in more depth later on (boringly so?). Hopefully my blog is readable, I worry that it isn't, or that the subject matter I choose maybe of no interest. I feel I need to improve, and would welcome feedback (straight talking suits me, if that helps!).

Thanks for reading this, Dan