how I came to photography - part 1

I was born and raised in Dakar Senegal, West Africa. I came to photography almost by accident. I wanted to be a moviemaker. Cinema helped shape my vision of the world at a very young age. Growing up in a small country town, the movie was really a window to a world that was larger than life. A little town in Senegal would not even be the size of a village in America. We didn’t have many distractions. Apart from football, called here soccer, there was the movie. It was an open air movie theater that was sitting across the street from our house. So at night, when we were idling, it wasn’t rare that we would go to the cinema and just hang around. I was very artistic. Good at drawing and later took to painting. Formative years I guess. When I graduated from high school I missed a chance to attend film school in France simply because the people who could’ve helped me didn’t believe that there was a career in cinema. By the time I was in university, I had been reading every book that I could lay my hands on about movie making until I saw on tv someone who lived in my neighborhood showing on TV some ‘artistic’ pictures that he took of Goree Island. That was the ‘click’ – watershed event. It really dawned on me that you could express your creativity through photography without having to worry about all of the resources to pull a film together. Gradually a shift was going on in my mind and I started looking into photography more seriously. 

PhotoCamel

photography gear 2 - different types of cameras

in the days of film, we used to have different types of cameras targeting different types of photographers and suitable for different budget. if we define a photographer as someone who uses a camera. from the occasional photography buff who would load a film roll to save memories of the last family vacation, to the seasoned pro who makes a living from taking pictures. in the early days of photography of course, there didn’t use to be such distinction when Kodak first introduced the brownie camera in 1900. it was a point-and-shoot camera designed for mass appeal and was according to kodak’s advertisement "so simple they can easily [be] operated by any school boy or girl".

point-and-shoot
a point-and-shoot camera is a camera that is simple and inexpensive designed for the occasional photographer who’s only interested in taking pictures and not worry about anything else. it takes its name from that simplicity because To take a "snapshot," all one had to do was hold the camera waist height, aim, and press a button. their extreme simplicity comes with a lot of limitations which makes them unsuitable for a more advanced level in photography.

it’s hard to talk about image capture without getting deep into camera technology. the photographic camera got its name from Leonardo davinci’s early experiments in capturing images in a dark room with a pinhole that would project a reverse image on the flat surface of a parallel wall. hence the name camera obscura which translates from the Italian ‘dark room’. see picture

sources: 

http://www.brownie-camera.com/

http://www.sharpfocusphoto.com

photography gear 1 - the camera

if you wanna get started in photography, what equipment do you need? to answer that question, you must first know what type of photography you want to get into. different types of equipment are suitable for different types of photography. the camera that you will need, the lens or lens assortment that will make your job easy, whether you’re gonna need on-camera flash, a studio flash outfit or whether you’re gonna rely solely on natural light, all that depends on what you wanna do. there are other accessories that may be handy depending on the types of pictures that you wanna take. but most certainly, you’re gonna need a camera. so let’s start with that basic gear.

the camera

the camera is an electro-mechanical box that is designed to capture light. how a picture is created depends on the type of camera. a film camera records a latent image on a film which needs to be processed for the picture to show. a digital camera on the other hand has a sensor that captures light and records it as pixels that are stored on memory chip. unlike film, the picture recorded on a memory chip is readily usable without further need for processing. another aspect of digital photography is that memory is volatile, which means that the recorded image can be erased without leaving any traces. the sensor alone would be useless as it need a storage medium for the virtual image to be accessed. film has limits in the number of microscopic grains that record the image. a sensor also has a maximum amount of virtual grains that it can capture. the amount of virtual grains - pixels - that a sensor can records is referred to as the resolution of the camera. camera resolution is usually expressed in megapixels - one megapixel is one million pixels. by today’s standards, a decent camera will hold about 10 to 12 megapixels.

talk about photography gear

people get so enamored about their photography equipment that when they meet a fellow photographer, they can talk at length about their canon mark 5d iii or their Nikon d3. it’s not rare to go to photo forums and see the debates between the canon fans and the nikon fans. I personally prefer nikons though I have used in the past, when I was shooting film, a canon ftb and a canon ae1. my love of nikons stems from how their gear looks, their aperture priority mode, and maybe a good dose of marketing. though canon has always had top of the line, nikon somehow managed to position their camera as status symbols with so many great photographers swearing by nikon. so I call this guy but for nearly half an hour it was a litany of effusive talk about photoshop, lightroom, canon cameras and lighting equipment. I have never been that much into gear. of course, if you’re photographer you may have some liking or bond with a particular brand but my point has always been that it’s not the camera that makes the photographer. I’ve always thought that these guys who would tell you how canon is superior to nikon would be hard pressed if shown a photograph to tell you if it were taken by a nikon or a canon. plus, it’s sterile. I really don’t know what you can get out of an hour’s conversation of canon vs nikon, aperture vs lightroom. I don’t use either anyway. I come from a background of film, so I was trained to use as much photography skill that I can pack into producing a very good image right out of the camera. so, to me, the camera is only the extension of my eye. any artist may feel more comfortable using a particular tool rather than another but it’s not like, if you gave jimi hendrix a gibson guitar he would be utterly incapable of playing a note. photography plays by the role of any artform. it’s not the tool but rather how you can use it, what you can do with it.

if you like photography, chime in. my photography can be seen here.