Lense virgin!

Actually, that's not strictly true - but it had been a good long while since I'd owned a camera. Long enough that the entire digital SLR thing had happened without me!

 

By way of a brief introduction, I'll just introduce myself and fill in a bit of background…
My name's Richard Evans - I've been working as a graphic designer and illustrator for around 25 years. I've worked with digital images daily, retouching and comping with the best - but until this year, I hadn't picked up a camera since I was in art school.

This wasn't laziness or anything like that - I just didn't own a camera! Everybody else in my family has one, but what with the price of kids shoes and the intimidating level of blokey f-stop rubbish, I just thought that it's not for me. I'd see people on holiday humping around 8 stone of camera baggage and chuckled inwardly at how they were documenting the scene without actually enjoying being there.

But during this time, I'll have to admit, there has been a growing desire to get into photography as an artistic outlet. A camera is another creative tool  after all - just a lot more expensive than a pencil. How hard can it be?

I took the plunge and lashed out a bunch of cash on a Nikon D3200 (I'll expand on this in my next posting) and haven't looked back.

So here's the reason for starting a blog!

Buying a piece of camera equipment is just the first step into the mind bogglingly complex world of digital photography. If all you want to do is point and click, that's great - bash on! There are way worse things you can waste your money on than a good camera and you'll have a blast filling up those SD cards!
 
If, on the other hand, like me, you'd like to be able to capture the kind of images that stand out from the crowd - stick with me! We can rope up and climb the steep learning curve together!


As a creative, I know what makes an image special. I can appreciate the craft and attention to detail, the composition and creative flair. To capture these qualities in an image is a much trickier undertaking though. I've made almost all the mistakes that people attribute to beginners - hopefully, by documenting my misadventures here, you can avoid falling into the same pits!

I saw a short video recently where the photographer was talking about the beginners frustration at not being able to produce a great image, and it really resonated with me.  He said that, as creatives, we all have innate good taste when it comes to images - we know what we like and this can be frustrating to the beginner when their images just don't have that special something.

His advice was to just push through this early phase, shooting as much as possible and you will eventually match up your images with your expectations. It'll take about 7 years on average! Now - that's a long time, but being good at anything takes time - I've been repelling women consistently for years now but it took dedicated practice to get that good (just kidding). I came away reassured by this advice and with each day's shooting, my images are stronger and better composed. I know in my mind what I want to be shooting though, and there's some years to go yet until I'm there!

Stick with it and we'll all be taking the kind of images we're proud of!

If you want to leave me your comments that'd be great - I'll be aiming to post on a weekly basis and trying to address the kind of issues and topics that I find interesting, funny or frustrating as I try to take better images - see you next posting