In the mid 1930s a young couple set sail on the SS Moldavia with a group of friends, cruising to Lisbon, Madeira and the coast of north Africa on what they termed a ‘proper holiday’. They captured their adventures in photographs which they carefully stuck into an album and labelled. Later they added to the album: photos of a walking holiday in Germany, camping in Devon and more.
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Some say that a photo should be a direct representation of what we saw as we clicked the shutter. I say, that is impossible. The eye, like the camera, may see the true picture, but the brain tends to see what it wants to see, and the photo may therefore disappoint.
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Today, everyone is arguably a photographer, shooting images with their phone cameras almost every day. But when I started, as a child in the 1960s, photography was a hobby, and a relatively expensive one at that. Only the keenest photographers went on the journey from taking family snapshots to an obsession with getting the best from a camera, trying to create something both memorable and beautiful.
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'Nature does not turn out her work according to a single pattern; she prides herself upon her power of variation.' Sometimes the most effective photographs of natural subjects (plants, animals, even entire landscapes) can be achieved by getting so close that the subject’s outline disappears.
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Turn your back on a hungry giraffe who knows you have a pocketful of her favourite treats and you can expect to be ‘nudged’ into handing over the goodies. Stacey was quick to remind me, with a gentle head butt, that she expected my full attention, but it was more playful than painful. And as she was happy to pose for photos in return for the pellets I dropped on to her thick purplish-grey tongue, we were each rewarded by our encounter.
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The San Francisco de Asis Church may be made of adobe like many others in the region, but its appearance is very different. Its thick walls with their jutting buttresses look more like a fortification than a place of worship, and its massive bulk seems completely out of proportion to the small community it was built to serve.
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The year that has just past will remain long in all our memories, no doubt, and not for the best of reasons. A year ago the new coronavirus was just seeping into our consciousnesses and we had no idea how it would turn our lives upside down. We certainly know that now!
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When you press the shutter on your camera you capture a fleeting moment, and when you share the photograph with others you share that moment. If you play around with a photo enough, it will end up very far from where it started, and yet a trace of that moment remains.
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When I was about ten I was given my first camera, a Kodak Brownie. And my father, himself quite a keen photographer, taught me a few of the basic rules of photography. The most important of these was, you must always have the sun behind you when you shoot. Sorry, Dad, but that’s just not true!
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'There is only one way to see things, until someone shows us how to look at them with different eyes.' (Pablo Picasso)
