Remembering The First Few Months
When you go out to get an SLR or DSLR, you have some knowledge of what theses cameras are about. For many, start out with a lens kit, its a way the retailers can get you hooked up with a camera body and lens to start out with.
I had done a lot of research by reading forums, reviews and watching YouTube videos. When you look at whats out there, certain names comes to the forefront like Canon and Nikon. But at the time I had read about Sony mirrorless camera and sort of grabbed my attention, it was an all new design, and today Sony Mirrorless cameras are only just been replicated by the likes Nikon and Canon, as they see the advantages.
So my first real camera was the Sony A65 with a 18-55mm lens, this was my starting point in my photography. If I was truthful, I had no idea what to photograph, but I found that looking through the lens I could see the world differently. My first outing was down to the docks in the city centre of Bristol, and I would go along the waterside and photograph wide across the river, the dockside cranes, the boats, all the usual kind of stuff. But I read about the different modes like aperture, shutter, auto modes and for most would say stick with aperture mode, which I did for sometime. Aperture is great for during the day, but as you get into the evening the shutter speed at f8 and above gave a slower shutter speed so my images became blurred and just looked awful.
Then I looked at the manual mode, the option that allows to change all the setting to help bring out the image you were looking for.
The first few months was about learning about the camera, and as I learned the images became more normal to a degree, but they were still not perfect. But the more I looked through the viewfinder the world became almost microscopic in detail, I began to see light and shadows, colour and detail, angles that made things become objects of interest. Then I began to see people, their faces with lines and age, colour and texture of cloths, hair that whispered in the wind, everything was becoming magnified in my vision.
Showing images I had taken, to the world of social media, is a big thing that can make or break you. Having people you don't know say something negative about your image that you are so proud of, and saying you’ve made mistakes in the way you’ve taken it, or how you’ve edited can be crushing, as there is always someone that knows better, because of experience, but if its done in a positive way that makes you look at what their saying, can make you want to do better next time.
One of HDR images, I need to go back there are re-photograph this place.
When I got my camera, HDR was the new in thing, and software was available to explore doing HDR images. At the time I thought HDR was cool looking, but when I look back and see how over baked my images were, it almost feels embarrassing to look at.
I guess at that point, I had lost my way to what I was initially seeing that was paramount to making good photos. People on social media that I had grown to know became social media friends, they were just names with avatars, where polite about my photos and encouraging, but I didn’t really know them, I saw their work and was inspired by many of them.
It hadn’t been a year yet since I had my camera, but one day I guess I woke-up and thought if I was to carry on taking photos, I needed to learn properly what I was doing and what possibilities were out there for me to get better and where I could take my photography. So I embarked on a FDA course in photography that would give a degree at the end of it, and hopefully make me a better photographer and use that vision that I first saw through the lens to make me better and images that others would love to view.