Me:
My Photography:
We all need creative outlets … they tell me. Over the years I’ve dabbled at a few including sketching and creative writing but they never took and after a while I realized that my photography actually fulfilled that desire.
I started getting semi-serious about photography, at least as a record of my life, in 1983 when I knew I was going to be posted to Islamabad, Pakistan with the Canadian Foreign Service. Having investigated a few options I settled on a Nikon FE camera with a 50mm lens. The inherent difficulty of changing makes as well as my laziness has ensured that I remain a Nikon user to this day.
When I was living in the Middle East from 1983 – 1990 I mostly used slides as, at the time, this seemed to provide a higher quality result. However, given that I could not get slides developed in most of the countries where I was living I had to send them back to Canada to be developed. At that time I would give my parents address as the home address so that they could see my photos. Of course this led to a ridiculously long delay, sometimes 3-4 months, between my taking the shot and seeing the result. It’s hard to learn proper technique when you’ve forgotten most of what settings you used.
The other major drawback of slides is that it does require quite a production to show them so that I found I often only looked at them every few years. At least one doesn’t get tired of them this way.
I’m a little fascinated at looking at my slides from my Asian years. A number of subjects that I was exploring in the 1980’s continue to fascinate me today – particularly moody landscapes, silhouettes and doorways. There are some good examples of these in my China gallery. Not surprisingly time spent in the Middle East and Asia enhanced my existing interest in architecture which has continued.
Looking again at my slides many decades later I’m a bit surprised at how many people shots I took – particularly of children. As I’ve grown older I’ve tended to be much more hesitant about these types of photos – perhaps the ubiquity and immediacy of digital photography has changed the dynamic between photograher and subject. When I was taking these earlier photos the subjects would never have imagined that they would be visible to the entire world some day.
Moving to South Africa in 1994 I continued to take some slides but mostly used an APS style camera for those day-to-day opportunities. The resulting snap-shots tend to disappoint so I haven’t included any of these in my galleries.
As the quality of optics advanced at blazing speed (along with my ability to use them at a somewhat slower pace) I’ve been exploring other subjects particularly birds. The overlap between birders and photographers is significant. I’m definitely a birder who developed an interest in nature photography rather than the other way around.
A week long “adult nature camp” organized by Ontario Nature in the Bruce Peninsula (around 1992?) led to my continuing fascination with ferns and fern photography. Fiddle heads have such drama and movement – at least to me – that they just beg to be photographed.
Editing …
Is always a work in progress – not only do software advances provide easier ways to accomplish things but also as I explore more options I think back to older photos and wonder if I can do “X” on that one.
Nevertheless with phenomenal optics and software advances I’m increasingly struck at the marvel of the human eye and brains. There are so many examples of a scene, particularly with great differences in light condition that still cannot be replicated even with a high-end camera and state of the art software. While High Dynamic Range photography (HDR) has made amazing strides its still unable to replicate what the eye and brain perceives. Speaking of HDR … particularly with my latest Nikon D780 camera – I’m increasingly exploring its uses in some landscape scenes where there does not seem any other way to try to capture what I’m seeing. Some recent examples from a fall 2020 trip to Killarney Provincial Park are in my “Elsewhere in Canada” Gallery.
When it comes to bird and nature photography I tend to be far conservative in my editing approach as I want to be as faithful as possible to what evolution has developed.