Photographs chronicled my younger life. It was just given that there would be a record of high days and holidays – especially holidays. They were definitely photographs and not ‘snaps’. Where others couldn’t quite treat photography as the equivalent of other arts, I always could, surrounded as I was by family who could compose a picture, judge the light, wait for the moment. This was hardly surprising given that my grandfathers, despite both being born in modest circumstances in the nineteenth century, were early adopters of the camera. In turn, my third brother has made a living in film and certainly knows how to take a still.
So, in turn, when I went off round the world in my twenties, long before the days of digital freedom, I took nigh on two thousand shots. I chose slides, as I imagined settling down to evenings illustrating my trip to eager friends. I always had an SLR and a polarising filter – vital for the low latitudes of the southern hemisphere. So it continued with every European cycling trip and visit to expatriate brothers, though in latter years, the record was digital.
But I went to visit said third brother in Kenya in January and, well, I hardly took anything – a couple of portraits to share on the family WhatsApp group, and some shots to illustrate my Strava record – no more than that. I learnt long ago that there’s no point in recording wildlife, as you’ll find the work of a professional showing the same thing at the click of a mouse, so why bother? But the real reason I take so few photos nowadays is that I know I will never look back at them. All those prints of Australia and New Zealand in the late 80s, temples in South East Asia, mates’ weddings in the 90s – well, I could never throw them out, but they are fully occupying a chest of drawers in the spare room, being no use to anyone. So why would I add to them?
Now, I’ll grant that I have never had the need to record growing children and grandchildren, and I get that that gives good reason, but I can’t imagine looking through anyone else’s holiday photos, so who would I show mine too? Not least as I am not that bothered about showing them to myself.
So I’ll put this out there: Do you still take photographs? And out of interest, do any of our cultivated fellow Afterworders declare a gift for photography?
I put loads on social media. Following my wedding last week I had some printed for the first time in at least a decade. It’s all so easy now, with any half decent phone camera being sufficient for most people’s needs, the same phone’s editing capabilities better than anything a film camera could do, and even the printing is peanuts (50 decent quality colour prints for less than a fiver including delivery).
Absolutely. Photos for me are a diary. But also – as my parents snaps were for me – a legacy for the kids. I get that family does change lots of things. They won’t look at them now, but they may want to when I’m gone. As I did with dad’s.The gigs I went to, the holiday trips, days out, memorable meals, the kids as tinies, my parents when they were still alive – they are all there in our family Flickr timeline. Not untypically it is me as a dad who points the camera for the majority of the time, but I’m in enough selfies. When I do retire editing, annotating and printing is a project I’m very much looking forward to.
I did a few years ago buy a good digital camera – a Sony rx100 mk 3 which makes me a bit more mindful about composition and selection. I do use it for work, and I would certainly agree that a dedicated camera is very different from a smartphone. But I’m under no illusion that anyone wants to see my shots except the family.
No photos on socials except whatsapp – chiefly of silly and strange things for family and friends.
Odd, isn’t it, as I too have drawers (and clouds) full of pix, seldom looked at. Just there, in case. Of what, I’m uncertain. But I love snapping. And will take a blurred photo of a deer or a rabbit over anything on National Geographic.
At least I have now an outlet for the shaky photos from the stalls, of bands and singers, if only for the real camera pros to look down at me for!
I’ll just put this up for now, I started photography at about ten with my dad. Darkroom in the cellar processing, printing and developing. I’ll put some more thoughts up tomorrow but I’ve had a tiring day preparing a new raised vegetable bed after having help to remove the plants that were in it. I never thought to take photographs when we were doing it. Bugger.
Here’s my first camera.
This was my first camera – a Paxette, passed on to me by my dad. I used it for everything – including a Greyhound bus trip round the States in 1966. I finally upgraded to a Pentax Spotmatic (which I rechristened Spasmodic for no reason at all) when the kids arrived.
Mine was a Pentax K-1000, inherited from aforementioned third brother as he moved on to more professional kit.
A couple of years ago I moved from a Canon DSLR with a bunch of lenses to a used Fujifilm 100xs (basically a much smaller unit with similar levels of photographic control) and that rarely leaves my sight. Not coincidentally, I got into it when the kids were born, but I also like to think I’ve developed a nice eye generally. There are lots of great youtubers out there talking composition, gear, travel etc so I’ve learned a lot. (That said, the compact mirrorless fuji-style has brought with it a ‘filmic’ look whose appeal has dulled through repetition.)
The transformative thing for me, though – and this feels like a perhaps unpopular opinion these days – has been Apple’s ecosystem. The living room TV is Apple enabled, so right alongside TV and Music apps are my photos, and many’s the evening where the family have clicked onto a photo album and been transported. Organised by album, but you can click on random, or the app with recognise common aggregators (people, places, events over the years) and make slideshows.
I genuinely think our engagement with my photos is far more frequent and enjoyable than when I was printing photos of an putting them in albums.
I do, but rarely of people anymore. That was fun when I was young, always meeting lots of new friends and doing wild things in strange locations – I quit photographing people when I noticed that it was always the same people in the same rooms, doing the same things on different holidays…
What I photograph now is mostly my city, but small details rather than picturesque views. Things that amuse me, or beautiful small details, or animals living the city life. I have a thing about landmark buildings/statues covered in scrim…sort of “reno Christo”, if you will… 😀
I put together photo books every now and then, of the best ones. I used to do one every year, but took “a break” in 2020, and haven’t had time to do it since – apart from a set of individual photobooks for my parents and siblings that I made using old scanned photographs.
I have a bit too much on my plate at the moment, but – like with everything else I don’t have the time to do right now – I can see myself getting back into it when I finally retire!
I don’t take as many photos as I used to, but whenever I see something unique and interesting, I whip out my Nikon, which I always carry around in my shoulder bag.
I have a nice little camera with a Leica lense which I love using but I can’t avoid the reality that the pictures from the phone are better. Annoying.
I take a lot with the phone and have managed to organise the archive (more or less) so I know where stuff is. My old paper photos are fairly well organised and I enjoy digging into them occasionally. I had a few boxes of 35mm slides which were my Dad’s and I had fairly good results using a basic slide viewer and photographing them with my phone to digitise them.
I love Magic Eraser on the Google Pixel – I got a lovely Welsh beach photo by erasing a family of 4 and their dog.
Mrs. T takes lovely photos of flowers etc with beads of water on the petals and so on but I’m much more vérité in my approach.
Since digital cameras were invented and then incorporated into smartphones I probably take 10 or 20 times mast many as I used to. Amazing how good these snaps can look. I very rarely make physical copies though
Thousands of phone pix, like everybody else. There are several boxes of photographs in a cupboard in England. My kids will have to deal with them.
Mrs W studied photography at the RCA. She had top of the range cameras, loved the darkroom but railed against “everybody taking photos on their bloody smartphones”.
Fast forward – she takes roughly 100 photos every day on her iPhone, 98 of which are great. Those expensive cameras lie unused in a drawer . I believe I took a photo last year, can’t remember what …
As a young man I had a Pentax Super-A SLR long before the days of digital cameras or even autofocus. I was quite a dab hand at photography, slide film being my medium of choice, and I would spend hours lugging my camera and a tripod around the great outdoors taking landscapes or close-ups of woodland scenes, rivers, streams, plants and flowers. I used a polarising filter to create dark blue skies against white clouds and always preferred Fuji film for its richness of colour. The results were pretty decent, but even though I later bought a Nikon digital SLR, I never really took to digital photography, life got in the way and I lost interest in my hobby. I have thousands of slides in boxes under the stairs which I never look at.
These days I take loads of pictures on my smartphone, but they’re more likely to be pictures of holidays, my garden or next door’s cat. My phone takes better photographs and enables me to be more creative than my old Super-A ever did, with minimal effort, and I now have thousands of pictures sitting on the i-cloud, but somehow the thrill of photography is no longer there.
I used to use a camera back in the day but now it’s the ubiquitous phone camera which is quick, convenient and does a good enough job for my few needs. I take shots of my work as and when pieces get brought to completion and I take cover shots of some the CDs I’m listening to so I can post them onto Bluesky to be roundly ignored. That’s just about it. I rarely take shots of anything else.
I grew up on an Olympus OM10 and then an OM2 as I got older and could afford it. I used to love taking black and white photographs (Ilford film) rather than colour. I still prefer black and white as a photo medium to this day.
Moved to a Nikon digital SLR (I think an F90 ?) in probably the late 90s and used extensively on trips, with the kids growing up etc etc. Wife and I both had digital SLRs – she liked Canon though, so we had duplicate incompatible lenses (in retrospect, pretty dumb move) and we used to lug our camera bags (along with the kids) on every holiday. I eventually moved to a Canon S10 compact for holidays and rarely used the SLR after that.
These days, it’s all on the phone, although I am not an extensive photo taker (and never post on social media etc). They are all dumped on the cloud and backup drives – I keep saying I will organise them (and scan all the negatives from my film days) but never get around to it.
My wife still uses the SLR occasionally (now a Sony A7) but it isn’t brought on most trips.
Still take loads on my phone, occasionally put one on social media, more usually on family WhatsApp.
Been going through piles of old printed photos round my Mum’s recently after my Dad died…I’ve always maintained that your REAL life is the one portrayed by those pics kept in drawers, in those little folders that developers used to send them back in, rather than the often quite over curated and stilted poses contained in actual albums. Haven’t seen much to change my mind on this really, as there was some genuinely thoughtful and thought provoking gold among the seldom looked at ones.
Got my first proper film camera around the age of 10. A Halina 35X same as Hubert’s above, or similar. Lost interest in photography in my later teens but had occasional Kodak Instamatics at times. Got interested again in the later ’80s and had a few Olympus SLRs and set up a home darkroom for a while. I still have my old Olympus OM4 and some lenses but haven’t used it in years. Had a couple of digital compact cameras and bought a cheap Nikon digital SLR that got a fair bit of use in the few years pre-covid. It now gathers dust unused. I used to take quite a lot of phone pix/clips at gigs with my Google Pixel 6a, but lately I only rarely feel the need.
No kids to document as they grow.
Like others I have boxes of uncatalogued photos, slides and unprinted negs, plus a lot of digital photos on HD and in the cloud.
I’m minded of my late brother, who had a shitload of old holiday, family etc. photos that his remaining son expressed no interest in. They almost all got skipped.
In the days of film cameras, people were a lot more careful of what they photographed. Albums were often compiled. With phone pix, people tend to snap/video away all the time and then can’t find anything that’s more than a few days old amongst the digital clutter.
I have three young kids so I take loads of photographs and occasionally get them printed. I never tire of looking back over the years and seeing how they’ve changed. The videos are priceless too. Every time I change phone, the main consideration is how good the camera is.
I also have a little Lumix Superzoom from years ago that served me well in my casual birdwatching and on holidays. I’ve encouraged the kids to use old digital cameras I had lying around. We had a nice trip to my father’s graveyard near Dublin airport. They wandered around taking photos of interesting gravestones and flowers. I think the 9 year old might have the bug as she has her own “not a kids”, camera now.
My father took slides with his SLR and entertained us with his projector and fold up screen shows, explaining what we were looking at using his remote pointer. Very able he was with fine scenes from all their travels. Later he spent hours scanning all the slides and making DVDs to show the images in another format.
When he died my mother was left to deal with all this stuff. In the end my sister went through the slides. She picked out the ones of us as kids. The family in the 70s, friends and relatives, many no longer with us. In the it’s those things you keep, that matter.
I do.
With a now ancient Nikon digital SLR, which came with two lenses. I have several batteries and memory cards for it, which I take if I’m going somewhere where I might take lots of reference photos of say aircraft or vehicles for work purposes. Everything downloaded onto my own storage.
The phone camera is great, but for a record image of something which I think means something to me, I can’t beat looking through the viewfinder of the Nikon.
I also have a film Canon EOS, and accessories, which sadly languishes.
I’ve always loved taking photos, and as others have said above, there is nothing better than looking through a viewfinder and composing a half decent photo. I know phones can take wonderful photos, but although not an expert, I do like setting the iso, aperture and shutter speed, to get the look I want from a photo.
I own three decent cameras, a Canon and two Olympus’s, which I use at least one every day. If anyone is interested, there is a site called blipfoto where the idea is to post a photo every single day, with the photo having been taken on that day. I am on there with the same username, and have been posting every day for two years now.
It is great fun, and also a great way to improve your photography. There are three types of people who use it I would say. The first are people who just take quick snaps with their phone of their family, pets, etc. The second are the serious type who have expensive cameras and have to have a perfect photo every day, and the third are the ones in between, of which I am one. Tomorrow I will post my 730th blip, which will be two years worth of photos. It is great to look back on them, as it’s like a diary only with a photo and a few words underneath. I would highly recommend it to anyone, but a word of warning. It does become very addictive.
Brilliant! Making art part of the daily routine sounds like just the thing.
See also: the Sketch-a-Day app, previously mentioned hereabouts…
I did two years of photography training in the mid seventies and like to think I can take a half decent photo still. I’m a bit limited now as getting up from the floor poses a problem. Taking some photographs of some snowdrops earlier this year I ended up having to crawl through damp grass to a tree to help me up.
It’s easier now to adjust those photos on the computer than having to do them manually than I was trained to do.
I did fail the course though.
As I’ve mentioned Simon Nicol used one of my photographs on his first solo album, Ashley Hutchings also asked for a copy of one I took of him.
As @Alan33 has said photographs are an excellent visual diary I’ve looked at some of his pages and think I’ll join up too.
Here’s one I took yesterday as I wanted to identify the tree.
Nearly all the photos that I see posted on social media I ask myself “why would you bother sharing that?”. To me they never stand out as original or remotely interesting. Except, I have one friend who I think is the world’s most talented photographer. He has an instantly recognisable unique style (which is, surely, the aim of any artist – one that very few photographers seem able to achieve). Check out his photos, see what you think. (I’m not so keen on his black and white photos – the “bianconero” section on his webpage – it’s his colour ones in the other sections that I love.)
https://www.massimodepadova.com/
Apart from your misplaced claim about “World’s most talented photographer” (obviously, that’s Mrs Lodes) your mate is clearly very cool….
Surely checking out your friends and acquaintances pics on social media is about judging them on how they look, are dressed, where they are staying. How impressive is their dinner, how many courses on the tasting menu? It’s being nosey and making comments (to yourself) which people love to do as is our human nature. That’s what social media is about, not the crap posts about rock bands that are often inaccurate. How the photos measure up next to Cartier-Bresson is by the by. I do like the accounts from the archive of cultural groups gone by, kids on housing estates in the seventies, that kind of thing.