Photographic Assistance

It's the lack of extraneous detail that I like. The kind of place where you could sit quietly, no distractions. In the other views, the tree roots take you away from the bench.

Time does fly! I have spent the afternoon trying to make a dent in scanning 35mm slides that I took in Malta in 1980. I was on a freelance assignment for several UK tour operators. (My ex-wife was Maltese. 'Was' is correct by the way because she chose to take 'British' nationality after marrying me not realising that, at the time, the Maltese Government didn't allow dual-nationality.) Some of the pictures I took for myself included this one featuring my two daughters (now turned 40). To me it is not a photograph of the girls but expresses the idea that the buildings have been there for a long time and they were just passing through. Yes time flies in many ways.

TAKE MORE PHOTOGRAPHS!!! One of the delights of this forum is seeing old photographs of Coventry. Often it is what was regarded in their day as the mundane that bring the most information; the streets, the rows of shops, and sometimes even the smallest details add to our knowledge of what Coventry was like before the wars. Where are the similar scenes from the 1950s and 1960s? Most of the pictures we have of that era reflect the rebuilding of the city centre or tourist type pictures of the spires and old buldings. I am to blame as much as anyone else for that. In my spare time I was more interested in taking the tourist pictures in far-flung towns and cities than the streets of Coventry. I have hundreds more pictures of Valletta, Malta, than I do of Canley and Tile Hill. Photography has changed with the introduction of digital imagery. Even the cameras on most mobile phones are more than a match for the reasonably good (and expensive) cameras of the past. So, let's not have future generations scrabbling around to find pictures of the areas of Coventry that receive little attention. You probably have at least one camera that slips in your pocket or handbag. Take it out more often and snap the streets around you. You may suggest that there is no reason to take pictures as every place is shown on Google Earth's Street View. But, in 50 years time, the streets shown will be those of 2064 not 2014. Here's a picture of some temporary shops at the Hill Street end of Corporation Street. When did I take it? It could have been the late 1960s or early 70, or it may have been on a visit in the 1980s. I can't remember. Can anyone help?

Whichever camera I use from those acquired over the last 10 years, and no matter how careful I am at setting up, all images need a little tweeking in an image editor. The industry standard is PhotoShop but it is expensive and really aimed at Art Editors/Picture Editors preparing images ready for magazine printing. It also has a steep learning curve. So here's a link to a review of 10 free ones. Free Image Editors

I have now tried one of the image editors mentioned in the link above. I chose to try PhotoBuilder because the reviewer suggested it was a no-nonsense type of editor. I usually want to merely tweak the image not reconstruct it. It is frugal on the space it takes up on the hard drive - just 8MB. It'll fit on most laptops. I'll eventually install on the carer's and her girls computers.

My younger daughter has got herself a part-time job: a part-time activity organiser in an old people's home in Hastings. How does photography come into that? Well, some of the residents rarely get out. I've suggested that Ann goes out and take pictures of streets and details in the environment to bring it in to the residents on her laptop fed into a large-screen TV. I suggested she also take them on a window-shopping tour using the same method. Digital photography has made all these things possible. It is no longer a case of telling a friend "OOO! I saw this lovely pair of shoes in the Dolcis' window." Take the picture and show her! That is the heart of photography to me - showing others what you have seen. It doesn't need a fantastic camera. In fact, a camera that you carry around with you is much more useful than one that can take technically perfect pictures but is so heavy that it is only taken out when you have a 'photographic jaunt'. It is the image that counts - not the camera it was taken on. But that also takes me on to another idea and question. How much do you really 'see'? If you look and don't 'see' then there are rarely photographic opportunities. I doubt that any two people 'see' in the same way. A photographer friend, whom I've known for almost 40 years, and I can stand side by side with the same model camera and we come up with different pictures. Every time! When we photograph something all our past experiences come into play - and that is what makes the difference. Both our photographic and personal backgrounds are entirely different. One thing we do have in common is that we never treat the thing we are photographing as an object. We are trying to capture our interpretation of what is in front of the lens. Photographing with my friend is fun because it's a bit of a competition we're only too happy to show the other what they've missed. Then we try to take the same picture that the other did and we have never achieved matching pictures yet. We couldn't exchange our ideas so simply in the days of film cameras, so we are more at home with digital. Don't think that either of us achieve immediate success with one squeeze of the shutter. If the image isn't quite what we had in mind then we make minor adjustments and try again. Sometimes it is again and again! There have been times when I have made 20 or 30 exposures before I capture the image I have in my mind. I almost know what readers are going to say to my suggestion of 'making minor adjustments'. It's along the lines of me having the knowledge to be able to make those minor adjustments. It comes with experience. My answer of course is that you will never gain that experience if you don't take lots of pictures. The adjustment may a matter of taking a step back and zooming in to achieve the same size image. That way you change the perspective within the picture.

The above image is part of an experiment I tried yesterday. It's about seeing things through other peoples' eyes. We do it every day. Any time other people show us a picture we are seeing what they see, be it pictures in a magazine or newspaper, their holidays snaps, or the pictures put into this forum. But this was slightly different. It was others taking pictures of our communal garden, a place where I have taken hundreds of pictures over the last few months. I wanted a fresh view on things. On Wednesdays we have 3 students come from the local Academy as part of their work experience. I handed each one of my cameras and suggested they go out into the garden and take some pictures. My only instruction was "Just take what you think make good pictures - and don't be afraid to experiment." All the images allowed me to see what they saw. Some of the views I had seen myself but this particular one I would probably have never seen without their guidance.