Personal photography
In our modern world of unlimited cloud storage and high-capacity hard drives, the practice of printing photographs might seem antiquated. Yet, this traditional approach to preserving memories remains not just relevant but crucial, particularly when considering the long-term preservation of our visual heritage.
With the spring definitively here (though some cold weather last week), I go for walks outside more often. This time I took with me the Canon 5DII with 50mm f/1.8 lens for a change.
The fields are covered in wee daisies.
Sometimes people call me pedantic because I insist on defining things precisely. I don’t do it for pleasure. I do it because it’s important and it helps understand things.
I hate photography challenges. They just don’t work for me. But I also desperately want to take part.
Many, many years ago when I lived in Edinburgh, I used to go to Fringe festival shows. Like most locals, I hated the festival period because it made the city so busy (and it was also when the council decided it was a great idea to do roadworks everywhere). But it was easy at the time (good luck now!) to get free tickets to almost anything.
One of the shows I went in 2005 was Japanese drums. The drummers were incredible athletes and it was a great experience (I still remember it when I can’t remember many of the shows I saw).
The images aren’t great, I was using a Canon 350D + 18-55mm kit lens (no STM, no IS at the time). But I thought I’d share the insanity of it all in silence.
Can I show you more flowers from one of my walks?
The rape is in full bloom (hello hay fever!). I liked the way these heads were framing the sun. I had to lie on the ground to take it.
Over the years, I have developed what I call my photographic style. It doesn’t mean my photos are good, just that I found what pleases me and what works for me. And that’s what I do. I don’t do this professionally, not even creatively, so I don’t feel the pressure to be different.
In 2006, I got curious about infrared photography. It’s not something many people were doing, especially digitally, but I liked the idea. I had seen film infrared images and wondered what it could give with a digital camera.
The difficulty was that all sensors have anti-infrared filters that made the cameras essentially blind to it (because portraits look weird and fuzzy in infrared, and it can bring blochiness to the skin). To take photos, you needed a filter (e.g. R72), and very long exposures to compensate for the internal filter. With a Canon 350D, that made the operation fairly difficult (hello banding!).
Since then, I’ve acquired a modified Canon 1200D without the infrared filter that makes it possible to do handheld IR photos.
It was another sunny day on Saturday, so instead of walking indoors, I went for a walk around our village
Admit it: you can’t always be great. Despite what “influencers” want you to believe, not everything in life is perfect, and certainly not from the get go.
