Why Do I Take Photos?

I don’t know if this is an interesting question, or indeed an interesting answer. But, I’m going to try and answer it anyway! This one is quite a long piece, so grab yourself a brew and settle in.

I’ve always been “artsy”. Just not in the visual arts disciplines. I started to learn to play the piano as a child, didn’t like practicing and gave up. This was when I was about 7 years old. Aged 9 I took up playing brass instruments, and it was becoming clear to everyone, including myself, that I couldn’t draw. Aged 14 I started to play the Trombone and it became apparent to me that this is what I wanted to do. I loved it. It was also clearer than ever that I couldn’t draw. Or paint. Or make things out of clay. Much to the frustration of my poor art teachers. Try as I might, I simply wasn’t able to do it and I didn’t ‘get’ visual art in the way that I did Music. 

I left school, had a gap year doing music stuff, went to uni, got a music degree and then trained as teacher. I decided after qualifying that this wasn’t for me at this point in my life, so I went on to enjoy a moderately successful career in something that was about as far away from teaching and music as it could be. A strange choice for someone who had sent the last 20 odd years practicing and devoting so much time to musical pursuits. I loved music (I still do now, but much more as a consumer than a creator), but if I couldn’t make money performing then I wasn’t interested. 

I stuck at this career, which I enjoyed for around 8 years and then when I stopped enjoying it, I left and went back to teaching. I know I’m not painting a strong picture of sticking with anything at the moment, but stay with me…

<— Long exposure shot of a bus near Harrods in London

Long story short, this lead to a move to London for a promotion. I fell in love with London and was out and about all the time, but wanted something a bit. I started to blog a little bit about my time there and needed photos to go with it. I started out using my iPhone and posting the odd shot here and there on Instagram, as well as sharing some on Facebook (Yes, I was still actively using my personal account!) and they were getting engagement. 

People were saying positive things about them. 

As someone who had always sucked at the visual arts, this was a revelation to me and was a feeling I wasn’t used to. Being the impulsive person that I am, I decided that photography was now my thing and I quickly sold a lot of DJ and Music production equipment to finance buying photo gear. I bought my Canon 80D (I still have an use this as my main camera) with an 18-55 kit lens, a bag and a tripod and off I went. 

I took myself out in Central London on my next free evening (I remember specifically being on Golden Jubilee Bridges) and took, quite possibly, hundreds of images. I couldn’t wait to get home and edit them. 

I got home, got the raw files out of the camera, opened them up in my shiny new Lightroom subscription and they were AWFUL. They were full of motion blur, abysmally out of focus, under exposed, over exposed and there wasn’t a single usable image. 

I couldn’t use the camera. I was gutted and I was worried that I had just poured a load of money down the drain. 

Experimenting with Bokeh and Depth of Field in London —>

Not one to be deterred, I sat down and did the unthinkable - I read the manual for the camera. I also watched hours and hours of YouTube videos which taught me about the exposure triangle, gave me some ideas about composition,allow me to learn how to use lightroom properly and encouraged me to get out and practice, as well as practicing around my flat. I was hooked, and took a lot of inspiration from people like Peter McKinnon, Nigel Danson and Thomas Heaton. I hadn’t discovered many urban photographers at this point.

I bought photobooks and studied other people’s work. In short, I completely immersed myself in the world of photography and everything that it had to offer.

I slowly started to get better and produced images that I was able to share with some pride (I look back at these now and think about what I would have done differently, but I feel like that’s a natural thing), people said positive things about it and I started to become a part of a small section of the London photography community, meeting up with other creatives to take photos!.

I got much better, found other sources of inspiration such as Liam Wong, Joel Meyorwitz and Saul Leiter. I became obsessed with shallow depths of field, spurred on by my bargain second hand Canon 50mm F/1.8 prime lens . The world, or at least my little corner of it, was my oyster. 

I was out most evenings and into the night, sometimes getting up at stupid hours of the morning to get the night tube into town when I knew it would be quieter. I was hooked. The moment I took my first long exposure light trails really cemented this for me.

<— Using photoshop to create views that don’t exist in London.

Being contacted and asked to speak at a photography club that I had no association with really cemented my notion that I was doing something right, something which appealed to other people and that they wanted to hear about.

Not long after this, the first lockdown happened and I found myself confined to house (just like the rest of the country) so turned one of the rooms into a studio and set about learning how to use photoshop and lightroom properly. I took online courses and practiced until I could barely stay awake. I also started to learning to edit video and bought endless props and gimmicks to help me create decent still life images. 

This led to me teaching photography at GCSE and A-Level, which I LOVED. On selfish note, it helped me to develop my own skills and learn about new photographers and techniques. On a selfless note, it led to me sharing my love of this medium with a host of young people and giving them their first creative outlet. It also showed me that you need don’t need expensive gear to take incredible photos, I saw a very high standard of work from some of these students. 

I carried on, I got better and I then found new areas to improve. Worked on these and then found the next thing. It never ends.

<— Learning to flex my landscape photography muscle in the Lake District

Then I moved out of London to the Lake District. This comes with it’s own range of challenges for me, and you can read about these here if the mood takes you at some point. 

But what does any of this have to do with why I love photography?

I think for me, a huge part of it is that there is always something new to learn and this excites me. I’m not someone who wants to stagnate, I am not someone who wants to settle for “that’ll do”, or “yeah, that’s ok”. It isn’t ever finished. 

Photography is a constant cycle of self improvement, which in a way is something that is very true of music, alongside all of the other creative disciplines. We never get it perfect, but we can get a little better each time we do something, and I like that. I like that a lot. 

<— Buttermere. The Lake District presents a whole new set of challenges which I am still trying to master.

The challenge is something that appeals to me as well. I love that each day has a different set of challenges, even if you are in the same location or a location you have visited before. Trying to make the very best of the conditions as they are the time, be that wet, windy, both or something else. The thing I am working on at the minute is getting out when the light is flat. We’ve had a very wet start to the year in the North West of England and if it isn’t raining, its been grey and flat and relatively uninspiring and I need to get out and learn how to work with this - even when the weather isn’t the landscape and scenery always are and I need to learn to remember that. 

Printing my own images is something else which has added another layer of learning and challenge - it’s not as easy as it looks, but that’s what I like about it, it’s something I am working hard to try and develop a level of expertise in. I’ve got really good at discussing paper types and manufacturers but only a small number of people find this interesting!

I’d always wanted something that I was good at (and enjoyed!) which was within one of the visual arts disciplines, and this has ticked that box for me. I know this sounds a bit like I am blowing my own trumpet, and that ‘good’ is subjective, but to have someone compliment the work I have done is something that I really value.

I also value the feedback and any criticism that comes along with it, but producing something that people like and want to say positive things about and that is visual is something that was alien to me and I am still getting used to. I don’t remember a single positive from my Art teachers at school, largely because I didn’t produce work that was any good, but I often wonder what would have happened if I had access to photography at school at that age!