Digital Photography and Confidence
'Even' by Alfred Drury,
City Square, Leeds
I know she's a statue, but I admire her self-confidence
in standing stark naked, in the centre of the city
My digital photography has always been about confidence. Self-confidence in unconfident times; confidence when I didn’t have the confidence to start something new, unproven, uncertain.
I can feel it helping now, working its magic through this project, in the uncertain times of Covid-19 and shielding – working its magic this morning while I’m writing. And it’s easy for me to project myself back to 2008 when I took the first steps to learning digital photography properly – to imagine I was experiencing the same feelings of uncertainty, and in need of the same magic, in the uncertain times after leaving engineering.
By ‘learning photography properly’ I mean with the help of experts and through courses, rather than repeating my self-taught approach of the 70s.
I’m certain that, in 2008, I was able to think back to those earlier days of my photography – to those ‘world-is-my-oyster’ days of the 1970s when I was in my 20s – to reconnect with those earlier photographic foundations and confidence must have started to bubble up immediately.
I can do this!
It helped that I was familiar with the terminology – the value of which shouldn’t be underestimated. (One of the reasons that I struggled to develop my fine art photography in later years, was that the vocabulary and ideas were so unfamiliar. On face value this seems trivial and easy to rectify but it was surprisingly difficult and unsettling). Another area of digital-confidence was in using the computer to store, catalogue, edit and display the images. After all, my computer experience goes back to student days in 1971 – further back than for most people – and continued intensively throughout my professional career.
I was also familiar with the camera equipment – the physicality of carrying, holding and using the camera confidently; changing lenses; adjusting the settings. And from my days in sport, I knew the importance of having the right equipment at the right time i.e. the equipment that was most appropriate for that stage of my development and experience (and not to be seduced by the top-of-the-range, most expensive, toys-for-boys camera – which would have been well beyond my needs and, more problematic, beyond my level of understanding at that stage).
You can see this progression in the box of old cameras I have upstairs in the attic – like an elephant’s graveyard – ranging from the first digital point-and-shoot camera to my penultimate semi‑pro camera.
My latest one (which is not residing in the graveyard!) is … expensive.
I’ve had a real sense of pleasure working on this part of my project. It’s reminded me, and made explicit, the fact that I’ve always had confident associations with my digital photography – it’s a perfect friend in unconfident times.
And my experiences to date show that it never fails to deliver.