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| Strip light at the Tate |
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| At the top of the escalator |
Not that sketching with a camera always results in wonderfully wacky one-of-a-kind genius shots. Some may be wacky and wonderful—but not very often. Others might be boringly conventional but most of them are just practice and keeping the eye working.
I'm getting fed up with being ill. Not so much the ME—that's bad enough—but this viral/secondary infection that seems to be going on and on and keeping me in the dreaded R-territory. I need to keep sending myself these postcards to let me know that there is a world out there that I can step back into.
3 comments:
It sounds pathetic, but I haven't actually managed to master even the basics of digital photography. I can point and click but keep forgetting about the various settings for different kinds of light. Anyway. I love the notion of using a camera in the way you describe. I realise that I don't *get* images in the way that I get words. And when I like photographs (as I do this one), I can't always say why.
Some digicams have auto everything with no manual controls and only a choice of pre-sets—but they still can take excellent photos. I have a rather old point-and-shoot that has a sort of standard setting where you can set ISO and flash etc, but the other settings are things like landscape, portrait, sports, close up, etc. I've taken lots of good photos with it and it's only 6 megapixels which is old hat nowadays but still plenty of pixels for a decent A4 print.
I went back to this camera after getting fed up with the bulk and weight of an SLR. I was going to eBay it because I thought it was a rather mediocre camera but when I saw the paltry sums that were being bid for this model I figured I might as well keep it and I was really glad I did. I took it out to play one day and realised that not only did it take good pictures, it was small and discrete and brought back a fun factor that disappears once you have a big conspicuous dSLR in your hands. The only problem with this camera is that it is very noisy at 400ISO and not much cop in low light.
In fact, you can have a lot of lo-fi fun with a cameraphone, and the rather crappy image quality becomes something of a style in itself.
Signs, my other half doesn't "get"' pictures in the same way as I do. I have lots of photography and art books, and I can just take a book to bed and study the pictures for hours. I can see an entire story in one photograph or one painting, as if a narrative unfolds, like a novel or a short story, or a poem. With writing, I always feel like I'm herding cats—all these millions of words that are all doing their own thing and refusing to tell you that the word you need is one of their close relations. Terrible things, words. Slippery characters the lot of them! A well-written book/story/poem is a pleasure to read, though.
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