I’m at a very formative stage, so I won’t be bringing the sophistication I see on other people’s threads here, because I haven’t got any. However, what I’m doing is important to me, no matter how primitive it might seem.
The BlindSighted Project allows members of Blind Photographers to explore challenges related to our eyesight, challenges that affect our image-making process. This project is an opportunity to explore how we approach photography.
And for anyone else who has had some thought of picking up a camera but hasn’t yet taken the plunge, I’d say, “just do it. Get any kind of camera, take any kind of shot, and try getting some results. You might be surprised how it takes off for you, and producing your own images can become an addiction!
I had a box camera when I was about 8 years old, but then I had more sight, even if it was only about 6/20 at best, and learned to take photos in the conventional way, looking through the viewfinder and adjusting the simple aperture and exposure controls.
Really photography since then has only been a very casual activity, such as taking a camera on holiday or recording other events in my own life. I got as far as using a 35mm camera which has too much stuff on it.
Then, 5 years or so ago I found out I was classifiable as blind, and since then my purpose in picking up a camera has changed completely. My first thought was that the camera can see things that I can’t, though I’ve since found out that that isn’t always the case – the camera can’t always capture what I see, but that’s quite interesting in itself. I have some usable sight, though it’s very distorted (macular degeneration and cateract) moves about a lot (nystagmus), and is subject to a lot of glare and colour confusion (poor genetics! Sorry mum and dad!).
I did buy a digital camera last year, thinking that would solve all ills. However, there was the little matter of learning the features on it, and both the manual and the menus were hard to get to grips with. I will return to suss it all out, but meanwhile, I just wanted to try my hand afresh with a camera, and the quickest way was to get a simple disposable camera and start to take shots of the world around me.
My subjects so far have on the whole been centred around nature breaking through into the city environment. Sometimes I’ll just find some object or other that doesn’t make much sense to me but makes an interesting image for some reason. Occasionally a building will grab my attention. I haven’t been taking pictures of people, on the whole, except for taking some of myself for the self-portrait project you may have read about elsewhere on this message board.
OK, so I set off walking from my house with my cheap film camera in my pocket. I’ll try to describe a recent session and how I set about it.
Actually i had two objectives at the same time. One was the self-portrait thing, where I’d find some interesting surroundings to take the self-portraits, and the other was a theme about life going on in the dea of winter.
No exotic locations here – I started off a couple of feet from my back door. As I have a colony of snowdrops taking over what I laughingly call a lawn, I thought a drift of snowdrops would be a good start.
I make less and less use of the viewfinder because I find that it doesn’t necessarily help me frame my pictures very well. What I tend to do is a sort of visual sweep of what I want to take, aim the camera at the middle of that sweep, get it roughly at the right angle top to bottom, and hope for the best. At times I’ve held the camera against my forehead, and that seems to work reasonably well.
I lay on the grass and aimed at the drift of snowdrops. No macro facilities here, so I knew I was taking a chance. One shot was almost blocked by a blade of grass, it turned out, but nonethe.less, I got a rather out of focus shot, which gave the snowdrops an interesting fleshy texture. In a sense it was a failure, in another I got a shot that I hadn’t bargained for.
Walking a couple of hundred yards from my house towards the river, I came to a ridiculous 200-foot-high rubber-clad building called the national Space Centre. It is so out of context where it has been plonked that I’d always wanted to take a shot of it through the railings of the local sewage treatment works, which would push it even further out of context! That’s a shot the tourists don’t see. that was nothing to do with my intedned themes, but what the heck? My visual sweep needed to go u and down this tme to make sure I could accommodate this grotesque tower in one shot.
Then I walked to the local park, which is always a rich source of material.
To be continued……
Responses
thanks for this! very informative. would you say your shooting has become more free when you stopped using the viewfinder?
This is so interesting vip_uc Thank you for the inspiration!!!!!
Hello VIP_UC,
Thanks for sharing your photographic vision and process. I couldn’t agree with you more that the single most important thing is to get out and shoot.
I like the falling snow idea. Try at night with a flash to freeze the action(Ok…so what if it IS a pun!).
The sweep-center-shoot approach: How about an overlapping (or spaced apart) series of shote that re-create the space before you? A somewhat longer than “normql” lens to narrow the field of view, and many exposures that when enlarged and displayed contact-sheet style, would show the whole scene.
Thanks again for sharing.
Thanks to all of you who have sent in comments. It’s most gratifying.
lodrorigdzin asked “would you say your shooting has become more free when you stopped using the viewfinder?”
Definitely. That might be the most important step forward I have made. Old habits die hard, you know, and I still find myself trying to look through the viewfinder, but very often it’s too misleading. I get much more of what I want when I look at the real world, listen, feel any rushes of air or sunlight, and so on. OK, if I had an enormous reflex viewfinder, such as you might find on a press camera, that would be different. I’ve even heard of someone monitoring their camera using a portable DVD player with a large monitor. But even then I wonder if I’d feel boxed in by it.
I like Drew Bedo’s idea of the falling snow, but we are not getting much snow in England these days. Still, the idea is a good one. Maybe when the apple blossom falls…… More complex ways of homing in on a subject will come in time, and thanks for that thought.
To continue this tiny but intricate journey……..
The entrance to the local park is a steep incline down from the road to the river. And there, uncluttered by the greenery we’ll have in the spring, was the perfect photo opportunity. The river, with its islands, and right in front of me, a noisy flock of seagulls. That with the rushing river sounds gave me about the clearest sound picture I could hope for, and I find this ordinary shot very satisfying.
When the next shot came through my scanner, I wondered what on earth i’d been doing. There was a mass of sky, and a bit of one of the river islands, very lob-sided. Just a failed shot, I thought. I must admit it took a sighted person to tell me that there was a lone gull in one corner of the photo. Then I knew….. I’d heard its cry and aimed the camera at it, not stopping to worry about framing or angles or anything else. It isn’t exactly exhibition material, but getting a result at all was pretty good going. I might be ready for some more advanced equipment, given that. I also now know that the concept of photographing with my other senses is proven and ready for development.
Some other shots did fail. It was a dull day, and dummy-face here didn’t use the flash, which was the only enhancement that camera had. Shame, I missed the Japanese garden and a sort of pagoda thing that serves as a shelter. Maybe I’d better go back when there’s some daylight. It was fine by the water – water puts out enough reflected light to make a big difference, as I’m sure any sailor will attest.
Along the way, I’d also been caught up in the seriously weird experience of taking photos of myself. This isn’t something I’d thought of doing until I was in contact with someone who’d come up with the idea as a college project.
You might like to take your courage in both hands and try self-portraiture, and I hope you’re feeling strong!
I tried not to be ‘posy’ about the whole thing, and the main reason for that is that I wouldn’t know how to pose anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever asked people to pose for a photograph, and I’m not going to start now – formal portraiture is a valid form of photography, but I would much rather make pictures of people in full flow.
The idea of the project was to get visually impaired people to take photos of themselves and to find out how the images may have differed from the self-image we have in our brains. This idea didn’t work for me at first until I started looking at the current set of photos.
Yes, I’ve aged 20 years since I last looked at a photo of me, and I very rarely look in the mirror either. So those pictures came as a bit of a shock.
As for the methods I used to take the shots, well, it was all a wild experiment. What isn’t?
I could dream of tripods, lighting, time delays and all the other niceties that real photographers might use, but at this point I didn’t have any of them. I simply turned the camera on myself as I did other things. Holding the camera at arm’s length and positioning it so that some combination of me and a background would contribute to a decent shot was all quite tricky, and as I know from some of the odd angles I got and the lack of background in many of them made this quite a learning experience.
So, those are some of my early experiments. It’s great to think that there will undoubtedly be much more to come.
am i correct in thinking that you are trying to photograph the space around you and the objects and occurrences in it? Myself, I have a difficult relationship with “space”, but I did find it helped me to go around touching the things that were around me, guided sometimes, but also as discovery on my own.
I forgot to include any credits for equipment and software and the likes.
Firstly the cameras I’ve been using lately are very simple disposable ones from Boots the Chemist in the UK. They have – usually – 27 exposures and a flash, and that’s it.
When I get the prints, I scan them with my Lexmark all-in-one (46xx series if I remember rightly).
Any fixing up I want to do is done with Paint Shop Pro, a very old version, 3.12, which has enough stuff in it for me, and I find it easy enough to use.
Windows Photo Gallery will make a slide show, and Windows Movie Maker will turn a series of photos into a video. I’ve used these in a casual sort of way.
VIP: Your description of your river shoot took me back.
Many years ago, when I could see well, we took a trip to the Grand Canyon in Arixone. I made something like fifty exposures on Ektachrome with a Speed Grafic. Back at home I brought the film for processing to a professional lab in Houston. They spoiled about twenty of them. An accident; the details are not important. But as I looked through the pile of developed ‘chromes in sequence, I could remember the scene that would have been recorded on each blank 4×5 sheet. More; I could remember the smell of the cedar, the sound of the wind and, the heat of the sun….and so on. While I was disapointed, I realised that ,while capturing an image is central to the effort, there is much more to photography then that…as you have described, it is a much broader experience.
VIP
You said about the difficulty you have using the manual for your new digital camera. I downloaded a PDF of my manual so that I can zoom in on it and read it onscreen.
Try Googling your camera make and model number + “pdf manual”.
Good Luck.
I downloaded a PDF of my manual so that I can zoom in on it and read it onscreen.
@SlowerThanLoris is completely about downloading manuals. I do that for most major things we but. I gave up on the paper manual a long while back.
Back in the original post, you wrote
However, what I’m doing is important to me, no matter how primitive it might seem.
It ain’t primitive. It is freedom. Going completely automatic can really free me from the stress of making a shot, letting me feel for use. Sort of like Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars learning the Force. At times, the equipment is necessary to make sure I get a reasonable shot if I need one. When I get frustrated with the equipment, though, it goes to automatic mode and I get back to photography.
the camera can’t always capture what I see, but that’s quite interesting in itself
I wonder how we can approximate what we see with the camera (or with software). Most attempts don’t work for me.
Read more on the original Flickr discussion thread: BlindSighted: vip_uc
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