Recently I looked through an old album of mine, when I say old I took the photographs in or around 1984 so it’s old to me. Many of the images are terrible, yet there are odd ones which apart from the technical aspects of the images I could have taken them last week.
It’s strange to think that even at the age of 14 I was pointing the camera more at landscapes than people; it is not a decision I regret, photographing people holds no interest for me whereas I can be lost for hours staring through the viewfinder at a craggy hill or crooked tree. Though I say it’s not a decision I regret, it’s also not a decision I can remember making. You’d imagine there would have been some conscious thought on the issue at some point in my past, but I can’t remember any of it. I do remember taking the photographs, and standing for hours in the darkroom trying to work out what the hell I was doing. It is something we’ve lost with digital, the anticipation felt as you agitated a tank of chemicals wondering what the film would contain.
Comparing photographs taken 25 years apart is not something I’m prone to doing, but it is fun to do every once in a while (well every 25 years or so ;-)).
So, here’s a couple of landscapes from my not so distant past…
I quite like this one, it’s a scratched print of an unnamed craggy hill somewhere in the Lake District, but it shows where my interests were at the time. Then we come to the more modern photographs (many will have already seen these, but they’re my most recent images).
These were amongst the terrible ones… Riiight? The others must surely have been bad. LOL
Never mind about the technical aspects, as it seems to me that some of the above (not-so-terrible-ones) are so freaking awesome it makes me want to give up even thinking of pointing another camera at anything ever again! I mean, your ‘unnamed craggy’ and those standing stones proves that I know absolutely nothing about picture taking… And I thought I had a good eye. *rolls-eyes* LOL
Btw, what camera are you using? Not that I’d be interested in knowing *cough, cough*, of course. 😀
But you do have a good eye James; to me it’s partly about getting out and just looking at things until you see the image in your head and trying to capture it, and it’s partly luck to be in the right place at the right time. Also, knowing how a scene can look differently with careful exposure settings is a good way of creating a good photograph.
I’m using a Nikon D40 but I think they are out of production now, I may have to go up on resolution at some point (it’s a 6MP and is a bit on the small side for some applications).