All photos on this blogpost were taken with my iPhone4 and are presented without post-processing. |
I was a rather late convert to photography. I bought my first camera as a present to myself
for my 30th birthday (an early mid-life crisis, and I couldn’t
afford a Porsche). The same is true of
mobile phones – I bought my first mobile rather late, well into the naughties,
and long after they’d been adopted as a supposedly essential item by many. I’ve never been a great lover of technology,
and I’ve always been attracted to the simpler, more primitive, more immediate
ways of living life. The shady woodland
canopy and burbling waters are far preferable for me to the tall towers and
moaning traffic of the city; the scratch of pencil crafting words on paper is a
much more enjoyable way to write than the regular, monotone stabs at the computer
keyboard (every letter of the alphabet with the same dull thud, anonymous and
indistinct); I prefer acoustic music to electronic or amplified music (and I
don’t think of myself as a classical fuddy-duddy, but I just think there’s more
immediate expression if you can feel your breastbone vibrating with the
resonance of another, real, human voice – as with all the arts, we don’t just
hear music: we feel it too).
So it’s perhaps a surprise to me that I now engage in nature
and express my love of it in carrying around heavy, modern, digital camera equipment
which turns the natural image into numerical data in a form that would have
perplexed even Pythagoras who spent his life arguing in the beauty of
mathematics in doing the very same. Even
more perplexing that I have recently found myself engaging further in the world
of simplicity by using my mobile phone to photograph nature, rather than
drawing it (pencil of course), painting it, or photographing it on a film
camera. But to me, the engagement with
the natural world represents a much more honest way to spend a life than much
of the offices and board rooms in which I’ve spent many years and grown to
resent.
Okay, so I must fess up that I spent this afternoon reading
Shakespeare’s As You Like It for the
20 somethingth time this year, the pastoral play in which a life in the woods
and in nature is compared with life of corrupt civilisation and the court. Shakespeare very skilfully makes the argument
well balanced as to which life is better, but personally I will always fall
down on the side of the woodland. Having
also taken a morning stroll today in Sherwood Forest, just a couple of miles up
the road from where I live, and come back to read the description of
Shakespeare’s Duke living ‘in the Forest of Arden and a many merry men with
him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England...as they did in
the golden world’. Pastoral literature from the ancients to the 16th
century so often calls up images of a golden age, but with the forest now
exploding into Autumnal colours, you could be forgiven for experiencing an
attraction to this ‘golden world’ in another sense, with great immediacy, here
today.
* * *
Shake it up baby now, twist and shoot! |
Exposure and White Balance locked for the moody, blue cast. |
So, having only dabbled in mobile-phone photography before I
decided to venture out for a couple of mornings and try to push my camera-phone
as far as I could and see how it would perform in the light just before and
just after sunrise. I was out on a
series of dawn shoots with the big camera, but the iPhone was out of my pocket
and in my hand alongside the SLR, and I was surprised with just how well it handled
some challenging conditions for photography.
The final shot. |
More than anything, however, it’s fun. These wee five-megapixel
images are just an opportunity for me to get out and have some fun in the
natural world without stones of judgement chained around my neck. They’re just pictures that I enjoyed taking.
That’s all. It’s immensely liberating, and it allows you to have fun in the natural
world without disturbing it or destroying it.
* * *
If I was late to adopt the mobile phone into my life, it’s
because I had something of an aversion to it.
And, to be honest, I still do.
This hasn’t got anything to do with the fact that I prefer trees to
transmitters or any other anti-techno argument; it is simply the image of the
mobile phone user that Dom ‘HELLO!!’ Jolly attempted to ridicule into silence,
but simply made more prominent. That bellowing
businessperson or screeching socialite connected to goodness only know who
goodness only knows where, whilst disconnected from the people and the world
around them; at best they appear to be oblivious to their surroundings; at
worst, they are ignorant of them.
All this talk of phones helping us connect, and yet for
these people they cause them to lose connection with the world around them,
giving attention only to a person from whom they are removed, a far-off reality
in which they will never be able to immerse themselves fully or even mindfully. It would be a mistake to blame the technology
for this – it is always the person behind the din that is responsible. In fact, the technology itself can help to
reverse the problem, connecting us with greater attention to the world in front
of our eyes by looking and taking photos.
It’s such a simple approach, it hardly needs such advanced
modern technology for us to make it happen, but the technology can help bring
us back when we’ve lost our way.
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