Saturday, August 05, 2006

Click

I've always had a camera, as long as I can remember. I've always enjoyed taking photographs. When I was very little I think I had a Brownie but the first camera that meant anything to me really was my Instamatic which served me well from about the ages nine to fourteen. The case proved useful, too: I once carried a lost toad home in it and the toad lived in a tank in our house for a number of years.

When I was eleven and on holiday with the school in the Dales the school made a film of the trip - quite unusual in those days. A comic highlight was of me staring endlessly at a waterfall, just staring, moving slightly, staring again - - the commentary went "Here's Daphne, looking for fairies" and everyone fell about. But of course I wasn't looking for fairies - I was looking for the best place to take a photograph. Not many children had cameras in those days and I think I just had one because the Communist was a pharmacist and hence I could get cheaper film processing. After the holiday I entered my photographs in a competition for the best diary of the holiday and won a prize, so the mockery in the film was well worth it, I thought.

Over the years I've had many cameras and my favourite was my Olympus OM10 which had a zoom lens and all sorts of fiddly bits. But all the time I was conscious of the cost of the film and the processing: my family would probably deny this since I used to get through quite a few films in the course of a holiday.

I've never taken my photography very seriously - it's more that I go "Wow, look at that!" and take a photo, like I did on an evening walk near Tenby recently:

And I've always loved taking photos of the sea - here's a seagull enjoying some evening sunshine:

But the digital camera has been wonderful for me - no film! no processing! So I feel that at last I can play around and see what happens.

Here, again in the evening, is a bramble branch that I liked the look of:

with flash:


and without flash:


I begin to realise that there's quite a lot to this photography lark and I'm going to try to find out what some of it is.

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