I am a camera
I inherited my love of photography from my uncle, a professional photographer whose studio was in the basement of his house. During the summer months I spent as a kid in the seaside town in northwest Spain where he lived I would often spend an afternoon watching him develop his rolls of film. I soon bought my first camera, which was nothing special, but later, while at university, I decided to invest in something more serious.
I had that camera for many years, and it still holds a special place in my heart: solid, heavy, reliable in any situation, and with a basic but effective light meter, it was the perfect camera to learn about framing, aperture, shutter speeds, depth of field; all things I still believe anybody who takes pictures should understand, albeit intuitively.
And then along came digital photography, which was a mind-blower, allowing me to see the result of my shots immediately on a little screen, or to shoot the same subject again and again, playing with the settings, and not having to worry about running out of film or when I was going to be able to develop the pictures.
I was already in work by the time digital photography came along, and so with my hard-earned salary I could treat myself to something special. My wife gave me a Nikon S90 way back when, and which has seen more of the world than Tintin’s backpack. I soon developed the habit of carrying a small camera with me at all times, first a nifty Nikon S6, which is slim and light enough to carry in a suit pocket, then a Canon S90, followed by an S100 that reintroduced me to the pleasures of manual settings, and that allowed me to take much more professional looking images.
And then came phones with cameras. I’ve always believed that if you have it in you, you can take a good photograph even with a Box Brownie, but it has to be said that those early phone cameras were pretty naff. But they were fun, and allowed you to capture special moments in a second. Then photographs took on a new, social dimension. First we had Flickr (I’ll never forgive Yahoo! for allowing it to die), and then Instagram, allowing you to edit your pics and share them in a click.
These days I take photographs of pretty much anything, and in all sorts of ways: whether kitsch sunsets, documentary snaps of me with somebody, or playing around with HDR like if there was no tomorrow: I’ll look back on them in a few years and laugh, but I enjoy it for now. I have to say I don’t really get the social networking thing that my friends’ kids are into, that whole business of creating conversations around a snap, which when it comes down to it is just using a photograph as an excuse for sounding off rather than appreciating it.
That said, I like to put my pictures out there, especially the occasional really good ones, whether on Facebook or Instagram, but at the end of the day, I’m a guy in his fifties on a network designed for teenagers.
Photography has undergone huge changes in my relatively short lifetime, providing me with immense pleasure, and I’m sure it will continue to do so for many years to come, as well as undergoing further change. I’m no expert when it comes to using technology to transform photographs, and I know I’ll never be a real photographer, I’m just somebody who likes to carry a camera around and take pictures. And I have to say it gives me a great deal of pleasure.
(En español, aquí)
