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| From the abandoned school in Sarnes |
I started taking pictures long ago. Then I became interested in photography - which is a field of study in it self. But for a long time my only wish was to take interesting pictures. I started searching for motifs. Nice structures. I raised my camera, and looked through the viewfinder to see if I could see something interesting. Often I did, sometimes I didn't.
As time went on, I found my self relying less and less on the viewfinder. I just sought out the interesting sights by turning my head, and seeing of there was a good frame there. If I found it, I took a picture.
Then I started to move about a bit. I could see that; this might be an interesting picture, If I just moved a little so that this edge meets this edge. I moved and shot the picture.
After some time I started standing still. I surveyed my surroundings, and then in my head rotated the scenery, and placed my self in different positions to see if they could be interesting. I quickly walked over to check if my predictions were correct. I sometimes were. Then I took a picture.
By this time I was pretty certain that photography had less to do with the camera, and more to do with the thinking. Wandering around the scenery like that, speeded up my search for objects - but obviously a lot was lacking.
I didn't find any books of photography immediately. But here and there I had picked up some clues about how to think, and I started analysing my own images. I found out that structures, lines and shapes were important - and that the awareness of these could be enhanced by removing the color. I took pictures.
My father gave me his old DSLR - I was already more technically proficient than him at it. I enjoyed experimenting. The technical part of photography, exploring the cameras thought me a lot, and opened my eyes to the fact that photography in many cases could show you things that were impossible to see with the naked eye - such as the wolfram thread in a lamp turned on. I did some photography.
I started becoming interested enough in photography, that I went out and hunted for a particular kind of images. They were crude in many ways. But more often than not, I managed to find something interesting to shoot at.
A photo app came along an introduced me to funny filters. That proved fun for a moment.
By christmas this year, I became bold enough to give away a couple of images for christmas. There was always some critical reflection behind them - some philosophical point to hang on to.
Months whisked away, an photography was not forgotten, but not at the forefront. At last I have found a book that in a very abstract and beautiful manner, decomposes the elements of photography and the photograph, and shows them to me in a very graphical way. I have found my strengths and weaknesses, my strength being the abstracted line and sense of depth, and my weaknesses being the thoughtful use of color, and placing subjects in interesting proportions to their surroundings.
But doing photography is an amazing teacher. It teaches you skills that help to to structure your visual input. Slowly but surely I am learning to see lines and depths, see the beauty in the clashes and splashes of colour. Soft lines recede into an obscure depth, and shafts of light fall through the air to emphasise a leaf pattern.
Terry Pratchett once wrote: What cannot bee seen cannot be named, and what cannot be named cannot be learned. Some the things I didn't see before, now appear beautiful to me. And that is what photography has thought me.
The road ahead appears interesting. Now that a sensibility to proportion, movement and colour has been awakened in me, I look forward to opening up this conundrum in my visual field. Sometimes I'll take my camera with me, sometimes I will only be looking.
A wise man once said: Upgrade your camera last. By this he meant that before you buy a new lens or camera, you should learn to use them to the fullest. Still, I am now considering buying a new DSLR, one that can shoot film - and at the moment I don't care if that one becomes my last. But to be able to ad movement and sound, now surely obtaining the the key to the knowledge to master time and audio would give me a lifetime project of exploration into the audiovisual world that so dominates us.
