the iPhone challenge

There’s something that photographers don’t often discuss, and it seems it can make a topic of conversation by itself, and that is the incidents and accidents that happen in the process of getting a good shot. Whether it be as simple as wading through water with your shoes in your hand or worse, electrocuting yourself. I actually did both of those in the one day, luckily not at the same time. I was working in Anglesea and when i finished work i headed down to the mouth of the river to take some snaps, nothing overly eventful but it was a bit of fun, which included whipping the shoes off so i could get across the river where it meets the ocean.

When i was done there i headed back home and when i got to Freshwater Creek i saw a cool looking cow. Most cows down this way seem to be the eating type, and usually plain black or brown. This cow must have been a dairy cow cos it had an udder, plus it was brown and white, plus it had horns!! It was like a trifecta for cow spotters, it was… the ultimate cow.

The problem was, when i went to take it’s pic there were 2 wires fences, and the 2nd one was in the shot. The solution seemed simple, climb fence #1 and go stand near fence #2 and get the perfect shot. At this point, most normal people would probably check if the first fence was electric, luckily for me, i consider myself to fall into the normal person category. I have since learnt from good mate Norbs that the correct way to check an electric fence is with a bit of grass, as the just gives you a tingle, or if you use your hand, make sure it’s the back of your hand, because your hand will naturally clench up and go away from the fence. Unluckily for me i did it by doing the exact wrong thing by wrapping my hand around it. ZAPPPPPP!!!! HOLY FUCK!!!!! I must have screamed fairly loud because the cow looked up and gave me that look that he thought i was a dumbass. I’ve never been electrocuted before, and i have no idea how many volts the fence was, but it scared the crap out of me. I think the whole point of the fence is to keep the dumb animals in, but it seems it’s also to keep the dumbs ones out as well. The 2nd fence was going to have to stay in the pic.

For the past few weeks i have had the trusty 20D with me when i go to work, i don’t always plan on taking photo’s but sometimes you see something and regret not having the camera there to catch the moment. Like last week when Tony and I left the hospital we were working at and saw an old guy shuffling along with a walking stick and a tracksuit jacket that said ‘Lightning Bolt’ on the back. Oh the irony.

Today we had lunch down on the banks of the Barwon River(very bromantic) and i saw some birds wandering around to all the different people looking for a free feed. Apparently crows don’t like lettuce, anyway i saw a couple of pelicans flying low up the river and thought i’d grab the camera out and see if i can get a snap of the big lumbering majestic beasts. Luckily for me, i refused to eat the wife’s sandwiches from the day before and still had them in my camera bag. So camera in hand, i headed over to the water to see if i could coax one of these big bastards to do a quick photo shoot. I was pretty happy when one came and flew right up to me.

I would have been happy with that but i decided to try and get some good ones of them a bit closer. I found if i broke up some bread and hurled it in the air with the left hand i could hold the camera with the right hand, finger on the trigger, burst mode ready to go. Throw snap snap snap, break some more bread, repeat process. I had a quick look in the display and saw a pic that made me giggle instantly. Sometimes the display at the back can make you think you’ve taken a ripper of a shot until you see it on the computer and realise it’s actually quite crap. But this time i zoomed in on the display to make sure it was all in focus and luckily it was. And this is the little gem i got, a goofy looking pelican that seems to have a tiny beak. I still giggle at it when i look at the shot.

Lunch time over, it was back to work, glad i’d taken the camera with me.

So i caved in, i did a self portrait. It’s something that has been on my mind for a while now. I’m not a huge fan of looking at myself in pics, but i have no problem with people taking pics of me, as long as i don’t have to look at them. I think it’s because i only ever see myself in the mirror from front on and usually with the same blank expression, unless your like my wife and have a mirror face.
I think we all know what it’s like when we see our heads from side on for the first time ‘i don’t look like that….do i?’. Then the realisation sets in, yes i do look like that from side on, what i thought was a double chin is in fact my whole neck and my head goes back a lot further than i expected. My head looks funny from side on, and don’t get me started on how it looks from the back. But that’s how the rest of the world see’s me so i have to deal with it and accept it.

Anyway it seems most guys and gals who take up the photo thingy hobby usually end up doing a self portrait, sometimes a lot more than just one. It’s become quite a common thing to do a 52 week project, one self portrait per week. I’m not sure i can do that, at least not yet. So i decide to do one, but what do i do. It has to be something slightly less than normal, i’m not going to just stand there smiling in my best tweeds looking like a complete wanker, but what to do?

For some reason i came up with this, initially i didn’t smile in the pic and i looked like someone who had just had their computer confiscated by police. It was simple enough to do, take a quick pic of my head, print it out in B&W and then hide behind it. Job done, thankgod i don’t have to do another 51.

I think i’m full. I have over consumed photo’s the last few weeks and now i am am filled to the brim. I have taken about 600 photo’s in the last 3 weeks and have vomitted some of them back up all over Facebook, Flickr and the ARSE forums.  I think it’s time for a quick detox before i end up like this bloke.

What makes a pic interesting? The other night I was having a little goosey gander at some of Norbs’ pics when i can across a pic that was nice, but not up there with some of his eyeball melting best. One thing about his shots is he always gives them an interesting or ‘quirky’ title and they usually don’t have a description. Like the man himself, his photo’s are very simple(that’s a compliment). But this one stood out to me because for a change he had added a little description to it which he doesn’t usually do.

“I remember as a little kid, looking at the tops of fences and wondering what was over the other side. I was wandering around the vege patch this arvo and this reminded me of those times.”

Straight away i knew exactly what the point of the photo was, it took me back to my young days when i was small and the world was big and full of things i didn’t know about. I realised that it’s not always about how straight the horizon is, or the exposure or blah blah photography bullshit blah blah. Sometimes a good story behind the photo can make it so much more than a just a good pic. And that is something that can get lost when photography becomes a hobby.

For most people that don’t take photography too seriously, the only thing that matters is the subject. Then once you start playing around with cameras and get serious, that part of you starts to fade away as you learn about all the technobabble like apetures and ISO thingys and the subject matter starts taking a back seat. Lately i have found myself pointing my camera at all sorts of irrelevant things wonder if they would look good in a photo, not whether they’d be interesting for others to look at. Some might, some might not, that’s not always for me to decide. It depends on who we are aiming our shots at, hobbyists like us who like a well composed technically accurate photo of a visually pleasing potato with a 3 color sunset behind it, or people with no interest in photography who only care about the pic showing them something they might want to see?

For me personally i take shots that i like to look at, if others find them interesting than that’s good. If they don’t, then it’s not big deal. It’s good fun and sometimes you get to share the enjoyment with others who might like your pics as well.

i’ve spent a bit of time the last few weeks wandering around out and about with my camera looking for cool things to take pics of. Yesterday morning, at about 6.30am i was laying in bed, brain going overtime thinking about where i might be able to go and find an interesting idea for a pic. Then i remembered a pic a mate called Macca took of his hot plate. I really liked the fact that a cool photo was right in his own house, not 100km’s away. We have a gas stove and thought a similar style pic might come out ok. So there i am, it’s still dark, everyone is asleep and i’m in the kitchen blurry eyed and in my underpants fiddling with a gas burner and a camera. Luckily that’s not the image i was hoping you’d see. But the gas burner did come out pretty close to how i imagined it. Now it’s time to start looking at other things i have maybe not even noticed around the house. Buzz Lightyear might be making a comeback in my house soon.

It occurred to me about 2 weeks ago that maybe photography was becoming more than just a passing bit of fun. It was 6am on a saturday morning and i was in the car heading off to do my first sunrise shots. I can’t drag my sorry arse out of bed at that time on a weekday, so why am i suddenly doing it on a weekend? Why aren’t i home in bed snuggling the wife?

Since then i have found myself doing things to take a shot that i never would have imagined i would ever do. Today while working in my childhood hometown of Point Lonsdale i had the camera in the car and the storm clouds were starting to roll in. I actually got excited by the idea of shitty weather, i had it in my mind that i wanted a pic of the lighthouse with a nice gloomy sky in the background. My grandfather was once the lighthouse keeper so it had some sentimental meaning to me. As a kid i would spend some time in there with him, holding on for dear life as i climbed the circular staircase with my back hard against the wall. It scared the shit out of me, heights will always win in a fair fight with me.
So there i am, standing in the rain thinking how terrific it would be with the dark sky in the background of the shot.

After i was done out in the freezing cold and rain i decided while i was in town i’d go pay a little visit to the cemetery and see my grandparents. One thing i learnt is it’s hard to take tasteful shots of a grave. Once again i found myself doing something unlikely for the sake of a photo, i was laying face down in wet grass in a cemetery trying to get the right angle to somehow make a grave look remotely interesting. Sounds like a fun day huh. Unless you get buried above ground in an Aston Martin, graves will never be a visually pleasing thing to look at.

I have no idea how far i will be prepared to go to get a good photo, but i have feeling i’m going to find out in the near future.

The photography bug has started nibbling away at me. It started with  my good mate Norbs getting bitten fair in the arse a few years ago by the very same bug, and over time it has gone from his arse to his brain, out his camera, into my eyes and is making it’s way to my wallet as we speak. It started off so innocently in sept last year, get myself a decent bridge camera for a few hundred bucks, a Canon S5 that was perfect the wife to take happy snaps, and allowed me to have fun fiddling with various settings i knew nothing about. Then at xmas time a good 2nd hand DSLR in the shape of a Canon 20D was pointed out to me by Norbs who said it was perfect for me, how could i resist a bargain. It took a couple of months of on/off enthusiasm and lots of frustration and swearing at buttons that didn’t seem to produce the magic i’d hoped. Apparently it takes a good bit of knowledge and a fair amount of creativity to make this big fat camera do what i had hoped it would do automatically for me.  Fast forward to the Grand Prix in March and i had the maestro Norbographer by my side for a day or so to show me what all those buttons actually do and it all started started to make sense.  A few times out of frustration I  came close to throwing all my gear in a lake, but the water was glassy flat and had beautiful mountains in the background which made a great pic, so i kept it all and persisted and now the camera is like a pet, it follows me places it probably isn’t allowed. But now i have found the image i see in my head will find it’s way into my camera, and that has made a huge difference to the enjoyment factor for me.

This blog has no real purpose other than to help me document the progress i make as i continue along the merry path of hopefully becoming a half decent financially drained amateur photographer. If for some unknown reason you find yourself here for more than one visit i will try and make sure it is updated enough so there is something new to see.

w00dsy