Amateurish Photography

Anybody who has followed my intermittent blogging may recall that my first camera was a Brownie Cresta 3. I used this for a while before being given my father's old Leica M3. From the ridiculous to the sublime! I moved through Canon SLRs to DSLRs and that is what I generally use today. I had a very brief dream of being a photo-journalist but the Career's Officer at school persuaded me that university was a good route to go and by the time I graduated I had drifted out of photography with any real intent. I have often dabbled but never seriously. I have recently begun to think about the world after work and taken my photography a little more seriously in the sense that I self-critique more. I delete more aggressively those images that are mediocre. I think more about light, exposure, composition and of course content. It is my sole creative outlet. My father was musical. He played piano well and as a boy was broadcast on the old Third Programme as his voice was compared to that of Ernest Lough. He loved the human voice and was a huge admirer of Kathleen Ferrier. I don't recall what sparked his interest in photography but he taught me to process my own black and white films and the bathroom served as a darkroom.

The book that started me thinking about photography differently was National Geographic - The Photographs. The haunting eyes of The Afghan Girl, captured for immortality by Steve McCurry, really gripped me. I still dream of taking such an iconic image. Look at Steve McCurry's blog to see just what a fine artist he is. But that was years ago and against all advice I tried to photograph birds instead. I had started birdwatching semi-seriously in the early 1990s as an antidote to The City. A professional bird photographer told me early on that you can't be a bird watcher and a bird photographer. Either or but not both. They are not compatible. I have spent 10 years trying to prove him wrong.

This week I spent a delightful morning at Mai Po (see previous post) and was then invited to join J&J to look for a nocturnal bird, Savanna nightjar. This was preceded by a potter around Long Valley and some tantalising views of Painted snipe, a bird I see regularly but which refuses point blank to strut its stuff in the open for me. So I end up with what I call "bird-in-habitat" shots and for which others have a different word. Birdwatching can take you to some odd places and so it was that we sought out the nightjar at what J assured me was the old grenade range. Happily this is a fairly off-the-beaten-track sort of place so little chance of young Johnny stepping on unexploded ordnance. Did I hear his mother whisper "shame"? As the light faded the calls started, described in the book as "a single piercing 'chweep' at short intervals". And then the first bird rose up. The silhouette of a nightjar is highly distinctive, like a flying anchor, almost falcon like. They are enchanting to watch but trying to get an autofocus to work in fading light is tricky and eventually (and too late) I switched to manual. Looking through the viewfinder of a camera you lose track rather of all that is happening but I guess there were 5 or six birds. They circled around and then moved away, hunting for their evening breakfast. Their whole performance lasted barely 10 minutes and I took 5 photographs. Two missed the bird completely, one was too small in the frame and the other two, though sharper were still in need of a decent crop to produce reasonable sized pictures. As J kindly said, "not bad for a first attempt". I think that is known as being damned with faint praise but he was right.

It is always more than somewhat depressing to review the images on the laptop when I get home. Invariably I find most of them destined for the trash basket. Some I hang on to in the hope that over time they will look better but without fail they look worse. DELETE! And so I need to do something different. Benjamin Franklin said, it is alleged, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Already I have a couple of great suggestions from web-gurus.

The one I like best is from David duChemin at Pixelated Image.

It says: Stop buying new gear. That's it.

He does then continue and demand that instead you go out and take more pictures. Simple isn't it. Spending money or spending time practising. Hmmmm. Why did I just order that new Canon 1D mkIV body?

I have bought a couple of his $5 e-Books (does that count as buying gear?) and they are full of good ideas but the message I particularly liked is:

"Waiting is also a much under-rated photographic skill. Be patient, watch what happens, and be ready when it does. Don’t settle for good when waiting a few minutes might give you something truly revealing or great."

This is all about Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". In simple terms one moment is better than another and the difference may be a fraction of a second. In bird photography this is especially true. The turn of a head and the contact is lost, the catchlight in the eye is gone, the light has changed and on occasions, the bird flown. Portraits are nice, action shots are better. Action shots with a story to tell are better still. Sitting in a hide at Mai Po I often struggle with the conflict between singling out a bird and waiting for it to do something interesting or looking at the landscape and trying to catch the action as it happens. If I go for the latter I often find the bird I had, literally, been focussing on has gone. Such are the dilemmas of the photographer's life.

I am also learning about how much more Photoshop can do. Processing is an art in itself. But that's another blog. I'm off to take a load of images.

IMAGES TO CRITIQUE.......



Gloomy Day in Sai Kung




Savanna nightjar




Yellow-bellied prinia




Female Painted snipe