I’ve been taking pictures for a fair few years now in the various places that I’ve been based. Starting out in Cheltenham, then moving away to York for university, over to London for a brief stint, then Cardiff and full circle back to Cheltenham for this, my wedding photography business. I’m certainly no veteran in the field of photography but equally I would say I’ve come a long way and I’ve learnt quite a lot since I bought my first digital SLR camera. If you’ve read my previous posts, then you may recall me saying that before my first wedding shoot I’d had a bit of experience in taking pictures of just about anything with the exception of people (!). Detail is something that fascinates me and so I often found myself taking some more obscure pictures – some might even call these abstract. I still take these kinds of pictures in my spare time but it’s really great to be able to look back on how it all began.
I suppose one thing that has become clear since I took these photos is that I now rely on editing a lot less. For non-photographers out there, editing is a bit like taking a roll of film to be processed. There are various things we photographers can do on our computers to make images look different than they do when they come out of the camera. To be quite frank, you can relatively easily take a pretty naff picture and make it look interesting at the very least. Granted, I still tweak every picture that I intend anyone except myself to see, otherwise it would be kind of like looking at a negative before it had been processed, but not nearly to the same extent that I once did. Why is this a good thing? Well it just means that you are getting the settings on the camera right a lot more, which sounds like it would be easy, right? There is a button on the top, you press it, the camera takes a picture…
On a simple level that is all there is to it. Press a button, take a picture. On a not so simple level, you also need to think about the amount of light the camera is letting in to take the picture and the length of time the camera lets that amount of light in. They are really the two (of many) main thought processes, but getting that right takes years of practice. Mastering it can take a lifetime.
But I digress…
Fortunately, there’s a Flickr page out there which houses all the shots I took (and was pleased with) from my first camera. There’s a broad mix of photography in the 100-odd images that are there; surfers, snow, insects, flowers, candles, cars, cuddly toy…wobbly bloke….
I don’t want to hammer home a ‘moral-of-the-story’ for this blog post, but I suppose if there was one then it’d probably be how interesting it is to see that while I think my pictures have improved technically, my style remains an integral part of my images.
Take a look for yourself by clicking here!
