I’ve never participated in one of these “Answer N questions on a theme” memes, although I was sorely tempted by these questions from ScribblingWoman (see answers by New Kid and Pharyngula for my inspiration). Unfortunately it came up at a bad time in the semester, so nothing ever happened.
However, I just got an invite from hkvam to contribute to an “Author’s interview” meme on Flickr. I’ve never actually been personally invited to participate in such a thing and flattery and ego will go a long way in my petty little universe, so here I am answering some semi-random questions about my photography. This will probably get a bit long and rambly; don’t say you weren’t warned :-).
Not surprisingly, I also posted this (with some minor changes) over on Flickr.
1. For how long have you been into photography?
Quite a while, as in probably 30 years plus or minus. I come by it honestly, as there are quite a few skilled photographers in the family from my grandparents on down; check out some of my sister’s excellent photos from her trips to Alaska and the Galapagos Islands.
I remember getting into (minor) trouble when I was probably 10 or so for burning a whole role of film on an old metal goose-neck lamp and the patterns the light from it made on the desk. (A huge advantage of digital is that these sorts of experiments are essentially free, but film and developing were another matter.) One could claim that even then I was exploring ideas of light and form, although I clearly wouldn’t have used that sort of language at the time. From the early days, though, I was fascinated by strange little things and developed a reputation for slowing everyone down so I could take a picture of some rock or twig.
I took pictures now and again growing up, but never thought about in any serious way. I remember getting some pretty positive comments on the photographs I took when I was a 17 year old exchange student in Montevideo, Uruguay, but I don’t really remember any of the pictures (and have no idea where they might be). I think those were all shot with a little instamatic of some sort, and if memory serves my folks were sufficiently impressed that they offered to buy me a “real” camera. We got a first generation Minolta Maxxum, one of the first auto-focus SLRs. That was a really nice camera and kept me going for some 20 years, although I never used the auto-focus much as that early technology just didn’t work that well. Big thanks to Mom and Dad!
Inspired by the new gear, I did a little self-teaching (books and magazines) and came to shoot Kodachrome slide film almost exclusively, usually with the camera set to underexpose a 1/3 of a stop to help ensure saturated colors. I think that shooting high quality slide film was probably really important in that it allowed me to (better) see what I’d actually captured. Print film is awkward because of the numerous opportunities in the printing to confuse or mangle the photographer’s intent. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people get all negative about their photography (“I cut off the top of her head” or “The colors are all washed out”) when a quick look at the negative (which most people never looked at) reveals that the problem was in the cropping and printing and not in the original photography. The slides were a pain in the butt to look at (lots of hours on a cheap light tray with a loupe) and weren’t seen by as many people as prints would have been, but I learned a ton and got some cool shots. I’ve played some with scanning in some of those old slides to post (like this shot of a fountain in a hotel in San Antonio from 1987), but it’s hard to capture the tonal range in the slides with the (cheap) scanners we have and I haven’t been willing to drop the $500 or more for a quality slide scanner. Another possibility we’re looking into is using a professional scanning service to do the heavy lifting for us.
Probably the real “breakthrough” was in 1985 when I spent a semester as an exchange student in Budapest, Hungary, and shot a ton of slides which got a very positive response from lots of people. (Again, however, they haven’t been seen a lot because they were slides and Flickr didn’t exist yet.) I also met WeatherGirl on that trip, and the two of us spent many days wandering around Budapest and Vienna taking photographs together. (And yes, it was absolutely as wonderful and romantic as it sounds, but that’s mostly because WeatherGirl is just so damn cool.) The photo here was taken on my second return visit (early 2001) using our first digital camera.
The nice response to those photos (and my increasing self-confidence) led to a lot of photography when I moved to Austin, TX, for grad school (which, I might add, did nothing to move my dissertation along). Buckets of wild flower photos in the spring, and numerous trips to San Antonio (e.g., the hotel fountain above). I even made some small effort at getting “serious” about it. Austin was (is?) a brilliant place for live music (another significant distraction for a wayward grad student), and I shot gaggles of B&W photos at the all too many gigs that I went to, several of which were published in the Austin Chronicle (a nice weekly local news, politics, and arts paper). I even had a show of these gig shots at Amy’s Ice Cream, a brilliant ice cream place that often showed local art at one of their locations. None of the photos sold (which was no great surprise), but it was cool to have them on display for a few weeks, and I got to give one of the big prints (of Dash Rip Rock in their wild early days) to my sister. I also had a few photos of an Arkansas band published in a similar paper in their home town as a result of a random contact at an early SXSW show. The gig stuff was mostly shot on Kodak’s nifty 3200 B&W film, which allowed me to catch a lot of motion on dim little club stages without using flash or special lighting.
I also worked up the nerve to actually make an appointment with the photo editor of Texas Highways. They regularly featured really nice photography from around the state and I thought there was some small chance that I might be able to get some stuff published there. I was politely (even positively?) received, and he liked a lot of my photos, but he also made it clear that there was a huge glut of talented photographers grubbing for work in and around Austin (just as there was a glut of talented musicians and writers and everything else). That pretty much ended that little adventure as it was clear that I’d have to put in a huge amount of effort with little chance of getting anywhere, and I really needed to work on my research. One comment that stuck was that several of my shots didn’t have quite as much depth of field as he’d like for publication, which made me all phobic about depth of field ever since.
Lugging around my big blue bag with two camera bodies and three or four lenses and tons of film became a lot less plausible when Sub-Evil Boy entered the picture; I needed to be lugging nappies instead. So I took a lot fewer pictures in his early days.
When we were preparing for our sabbatical year in the UK (2000-2001) we decided to it was finally time to move into the digital age. So we sold a bunch of cameras (including my old Maxxum) on Ebay and used the money to buy our first digital camera (a Canon S20). We took (literally) thousands of digital pictures that year, including this shot on the roof of the Tate St. Ives gallery. Sub-Evil was old enough to carry some of his own stuff, and the camera was wonderfully small and light, which really freed me up to shot again. In that year I became a complete digital convert. There are things I miss about film, and definitely things I miss about an SLR, but the incredible flexibility and support for experimentation just rocks.
When we got back we set up a Gallery install on our family news site. Then a few months ago I discovered Flickr, which was a total distraction in a wonderful way. The next big jump will be the acquisition of a digital SLR, which might happen next summer, or might not. We’ll have to wait and see.
2. why? what’s the answer if friends ask you, while you’re carrying your cam everywhere?
Why do writers write, or artists make art, or singers sing? That said, I find that having a camera totally changes my experiences of places and events. I have a very poor memory for events, but a good memory for single, static, still images. Thus I can often remember photographs I’ve taken much more clearly than my actual experience of those events. Even weirder, my memories of “real” experiences often are photograph-like, images that I didn’t photograph but which I remember in a way not unlike a photograph.
Having a camera also significantly changes the way I see the world around me. In some ways I become much more detached (which isn’t always a good thing), but I also become much more focussed, and aware of little details and odd things tucked away in corners (like the photo of the slates above).
3. what is most often in your spot?
That’s really tough, because my photographic subjects tend to vary pretty wildly. As mentioned above, I have an affection for odd details, as well as interesting light and images with strong geometric or pattern elements. I’m a sucker for pretty flowers and an odd rock. I think I’m more into “discovering” photos than “making” them, so my recent white hands photos are fairly unusual.
The one thing that I can say with some certainty, though, is that historically I haven’t favored people shots, although digital is perhaps changing that. I often feel awkward taking pictures of people (invading their space?), which makes them feel uncomfortable, which typically doesn’t lead to a good shot. So I could go literally hundreds of shots without including any people, which arguably isn’t a Good Thing since people are often an important source of interest and focus in an image. The one exception were the concert photos; I think the anonymity of being in a crowd and the musicians’ role as public performers allowed me to relax, and my presence really didn’t affect them anyway.
Digital is arguably improving my photography of people, mostly because I feel free to just shoot scads of photographs without worrying about whether people are “posed” or “ready”. Thus I often get some neat shots (like the one above) before or after the “official” shot.
4. day or night?
Probably day, although I’d never really thought about it. I like taking pictures at night, but the technical challenges are often not trivial.
I tend to not like the middle of the day because the light is often so harsh, especially in the summer. A lot of mid-day garden photos from our recent trip to Stratford upon Avon aren’t real great because of this sort of harsh lighting. Back in the SLR days I often used to use a polarizing filter to help cut down on high sun glare and pop the colors, and that’s been one of the things that I’ve missed in moving from SLRs to these nifty little point and shoot digitals.
I also shoot a lot of stuff inside, often in fairly low light. I hate the way flash usually makes my pictures look, and I don’t like staging the lighting, so these are often long-ish exposures. Happily, a reasonably steady hand (so far) and some bracing tricks are often sufficient to the task.
5. favourite color(s)?
Not a clue. Looking over what I’ve posted to Flickr so far, there are a lot of fairly muted, earth tone shots, and I suspect that’s fairly typical. There are exceptions (especially in flower shots), but as a rule I don’t seem drawn to strong colors. Not much red, which is too bad since I remember reading years ago that a shot with a strong red component had a much higher chance of being used for a magazine cover.
Epilogue
There’s a reason I don’t do memes. This probably took six or eight or ten hours. Most of that was writing and editing, but a lot of it was looking up the various links, as well as finding and posting old photos to try to illustrate different points. (I posted my 100th photo to Flickr while doing this!) And that could have been worse. I didn’t even try to find any really old photos like the 1985 Budapest material, or scan in some of the B&W concert shots from Austin. I’m sure I was supposed to be doing something else instead of writing my photographic biography. It was fun, but I can’t be doing this too often or they’ll find me homeless in some alley muttering about how blogging and Flickr stole my life…
