The Transformation
Over the last year and a half I’ve been getting more and more engrossed in the subject of photography. I suppose it started before that when I was about 10 and I had a Zenith E for a couple of years but really the interest came about when I bought a Canon 20D with some money I was owed from my company. A week after I bought the camera I went on a holiday in Cornwall and although I didn’t take many great pictures, I took a couple that I really liked and that was the hook. Seeing those photographs printed out with my Epson 2400 was immensely satisfying.
During August of that year, myself and my wife visited various locations around Yorkshire and I took a handful of good shots (particularly of Brimham Rocks and Malham Cove which I’ll post later). Of course, I made a couple of mistakes when I bought the lenses for the camera and sold a few lenses and then sold the camera to get a 5D, which I’ll write about later. I also made loads of compositional mistakes and I’ll pick a few of those out too.
What really motivated me to push photography harder was the total immersive pleasure of being in a beautiful location and trying to portray that feeling through the camera. The process of doing this, whether successful or not, is liberating. It makes you look at things and appreciate things in a way you never would by simply being in a location.
I am now on the edge of another step change over to the “Dark Slide”, as David Ward would put it, and I want to document my thoughts, locations, processes etc so this is a start to that process. I’ll try to post every other day, which may mean I’ll catch up at weekends but we’ll see.
For the first few months, the posts will be mix of my thinking on photography, historical entries to catch up with the present day, hardware discussion (a bit) and also my thoughts as I prepare for the world of Large Format Photography.
