vendredi 19 novembre 2004

Lucky Black Cat? Practice, practice, practice... Probably more sportsmen have been credited with saying it than did... and in probably more sports than the one in which it happened... but it was the South African golfer Gary Player who, when responding to a spectator's comment after a perfect drive from the tee, "What a lucky shot!" responded with, "Sure thing, and the more I practice the luckier I get!" It's the same with photography... you can put good money down on the store counter and buy the smartest auto-everything camera around, but if you don't know the basics you're probably not even going to get one great shot with Lady Luck watching through the viewfinder. It all comes down to averages. I think I'm a half-decent photographer with a fairly artistic eye, a modest understanding of the science and a liking for the craft. I've never trained or taken one lesson as a photographer and yet I've been a professional for the best part of 30 years operating within the TV, newspaper, publicity, retail, magazine editorial and publishing sectors. None of it was undertaken with previous training... I just got into it, learnt the ropes, practised a lot, and walked the streets looking for more work. I certainly had to understand the basics as well as learning them even if I never had to apply them directly. And if that sounds odd I'm reminded of a conversation with alt.photo Heliochrome creator Dunstan Perera who was equally bemused when interviewing a photography student in the UK... she hadn't heard of either Ansel Adams or his Zone System method of exposure and development. Whilst neither knowledge of the name or the system are necessary to get a job in the photographic industry the fact that the student didn't know, and worse, that her tutors hadn't even informed or let alone taught her arguably the best known technique of the past fifty years beggared belief. But the future generations of photographic students will probably go along the same route... why bother learning the craft and science when you can tweak an image in your computer using Photoshop and make an ink-jet print as good as or better than a silver print from a traditional darkroom. What's more you can save that information file to disk and your children can make an identical print twenty, thirty or more years from now knowing even less than you might have done. Even if I write down all the relevant darkroom data on the back of a print I'll have trouble making an absolutely identical copy the next day because there are simply too many variables that come into play! Even if I get the paper grade and exposure time, dodging and burning-in manipulations, not to mention the chemistry temperature, dilution and processing time exactly the same... there's my mental attitude to factor into the equation. And, I may think I have a way of making yesterday's print better tomorrow... that's the mélange of art, craft and science... there's no luck attached to it... it's all down to practice! In a way I think traditional photographers and darkroom users are very fortunate because they have a more interesting arsenal of products and techniques than Photoshop users. If you look at (and I dare you to try) all of the "plug-ins" provided with computer image manipulation software nowadays you'll soon realise that 95% are tricks and only 5% are treats. On the traditional side of photography you have much more to play with when considering the number of films multiplied by the number of developers (and dilutions) multiplied by the number of papers... so the fine-tuning possibilities are nearly endless. And it's all practice... practice... practice... perhaps for no other use except for your own pleasure. But with that pleasure you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have made an image... and that you understand how the process worked... and that if you had made a change somewhere along the line a different and known end-result would have been produced... and that none of it was to do with luck. Oh yeh... I almost forgot to mention the black cat... it was a grab-shot in one of the back streets here in town using a Nikon F2, standard 50mm lens and no exposure meter. The cat bounded over the step... I raised my camera and clicked once... didn't paws (a pun!) to focus, change the lens' aperture or the camera's shutter speed... it was all pre-set for the conditions... time of day, lighting and narrowness of street location (don't pre-set infinity focus in a narrow location!) It was all very simple to do on an auto-nothing camera with a basic standard lens... and I can count every whisker and most of the hairs on the moody moggy. Admittedly Ilford Delta 100 Pro and Xtol is a good film and developer combination, but as I said... none of it was to do with luck! 8:10:30 PM    comment []