What does photography mean to you?
What does photography mean to you? Photography to me is one big, exciting, creative explosion, which doesn’t have to be defined or questioned to give one outcome but embraced and shared with one another. My photography lets me express my personality and who I am. We can define photography by looking at the oxford dictionary but does that tell us everything we need to know about photography? We can define the progression of photography through time scale. The first recorded photograph in 1826 by a French scientist named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He used the invention of the camera obscura by exposing a bitumen-coated plate and leaving it for several hours on his windowsill. Now all we have to do is click a button and it is ready to be printed, uploaded and shared. The increasing quality of technology is a tool that has help speed work rate and processing but we still have the option to go 'old school'.
I love film photography and although I have only used film a handful of times I will never get over the pure quality and the excitement of going though the stages of processing to reveal my first strip of film images.
In my first year of collage I did a project called 'Me and my precious things'. I had to use the 5X4 large format camera and I was really excited about doing this project. I used my twin sister and the things most precious to her...SPORTS! We made a mood board with four ideas; past hobbies, present hobbies, lifestyle and personal objects. Here are some of my final images (scanned).
I’m sure you can guess what types of sports she likes?
This project was precious to me because I got to capture my other half. We are very similar in some aspects and very different in others but this project brought sport, photography and us together to display what our passion is. Using film really made me understand how to control lighting and it’s not as easy as people may think. I had to make sure the aperture, exposure and shutter speed was set correctly and that was just the basics. I did have one film that was completely over exposed because I forgot to turn the light off in the DARK room...ooops! With todays digital technology we don’t worry about such things as turning off a light (unless you are planning on doing star trails) and even if your image is over exposed you can delete and repeat in a matter of seconds. AMAZING!
I have been snapping away since I was about eleven years old with my Granddads Panasonic DMC-FZ18, where I messed around with the mode settings but still I didn’t really understand what they meant or what they did. I loved taking myself places around the village and looking for animal’s hiding in the bushes, glistening spider webs on a cold winters morning or hiding myself away in my room to set up a mini studio using my bedside lamp and anything else I could find.
I knew that photography would be a big part of my life and I wanted to learn how to take amazing photos like the ones in magazines and TV adverts.
I found out that commercial and advertising photography was where I wanted to go when I took to the studio at college. Setting up and creating a clean modern look using Photoshop to manipulate photos and enhancing colour, tone and texture was so much fun.
When I look at a product I think "how do I make it stand out to any product of its kind?" I take pictures from different angles, change the lighting set- up, the surrounding environment, adding or taking away accessories…etc.
I think photography takes time and patients, where you can create more than one great style for one image. Experimentation is the key and stepping away from my comfort zone can lead to great things...or maybe not.
Not long ago I went to Lymme House for a day out. I stood in the Courtyard for a while and didn’t think much of taking photos that day because it was a dull day and nothing really appealed to me. Suddenly I had a vision! No one was around and the courtyard was completely empty. I knew it was a dull day but I envisioned a golden sunset spilling over a grand house, which held many secrets within the walls.
Here is the before and after images.
Finishing this image gave me great satisfaction; I was agitated to show everyone my vision.
Photography is my way of saying "welcome to my world'. Sharing my ideas and creativity brings me happiness and I hope to other people too. There is no limit to creating an idea and only I can bring that picture in my head to life. I always challenge myself and push my visions to reality with any task I am given. No one will have exactly the same feeling on every aspect of life just like one pair of eyes will see differently to another and it is that individual thought process that leads us to freedom of creativity.
Photogrphy doesnt have to mean anything to you or be defind to a certain point and you dont have to know the in's and out's of photography to appreciate it in your own way. It is whatever you want it to be.
