Immature Student

Woah, that’s supposed to read I’m a mature student, dang autocorrect… Well it’s official, I’ve been offered a place on the BA Hons Photography Degree course at the University Of Wolverhampton and I’ve accepted it.

My student ID came in the post this week and I’ve managed to set up my accounts and apps ready to begin next week, I’m excited to begin learning and working at something away from my current profession, but who knows maybe my next career.

Feelings

Nervous is also an emotion I’m experiencing at the moment too, it’s been a while since I’ve been in an education establishment without giving career talks to students or learning about IT. I’m treating it like the TV Game Shows that I apply for, it’s exciting and will be a great experience with no real danger involved. What’s the worst that could happen?

If it all goes pear shaped and I have to drop out then I’ll just have to pay back my student loan gradually, I don’t see that as a possibility though. I’m a stubborn git sometimes and I’ll deffo be sticking this out as long as it doesn’t start threatening my day job. My employer is generally very flexible about things like this and I only see it geeing me up and getting my mojo back and all the positives that will bring to my daily work.

Now I have access to some of the content allowed to students I’m excited to read about the different film cameras that they have on site and the facilities to process the images using all sorts of techniques. I’ve never been in a dark room apart from the Uni open day so I know I’m going to act like I’ve just seen real magic performed when I see a photo being developed in there. It’s one of those processes that sounds simple on the face of it , needs some expert knowledge and produces a still frame of what was in front of the lens at the time the shutter was opened. The process is still like a form of wizardry, I wonder if you have to utter a Harry Potter style spell when swishing the photo in the developer fluid..

The excitement has built up in me and I’m finding excuses to go out and take photos, whether it’s in the streets around my town or across the fields for some landscape shots. I’m reading photography books, watching youtube videos, the movie “Everybody Street” and going through lightroom selecting photos I’m happy with.

Return To Social Media

The social media has been reinstated too, I’ve kicked up an Instagram account again after my last one was just filled with spam and scams, i’ve uploaded a few of my favourite photos from recent times as well as a couple from my portfolio. I’ve started following a few more photographers than I used to, including some of the staff from the uni course. I’m loving seeing what their approaches are to togging.

My only issue with using Instagram though is that I take pictures generally on my camera, a Canon 5D MkIV and upload the files to my Lightroom catalog and then it’s difficult to get them into Instagram as it’s mainly designed around the app. I found a few sites that pointed me towards using Vivaldi web browser which allows you to add a “Web Panel” to the left frame of the browser and then it generally behaves like the app except that it doesn’t allow you to upload multiple images together or add a story. But it’s still better than exporting everything into my iCloud then adding from there into the app on my phone.

The wordpress blog has been rekindled as you can tell, because you’re reading this, obviously. It’ll hopefully be a record of lessons learnt on my degree course and experiences from the journey.

My Flickr page is back up after a complete cessation when they started charging big money for the Pro version. Again, rather than filling it with all of my images from a shoot, I’m trying to be more selective and only publish images that I’m super happy with.

My YouTube channel hasn’t been dropped but I’ve got very little content on there that I’ve created around photography. There is some of a 3D Tutorial that I did for our Caterpillar Photographic Society and some random content about some of my other interests…

I did buy an Insta360 camera to fit onto my camera’s hot shoe to video some of my street photography sessions but it fell off the first time I went out, damaged the lens so I sent it for repair to Honk Kong, and then sold it as I didn’t need it. If I go back down this route I might just get a GoPro that’s not quite as vulnerable. Some of the people I subscribe to on YouTube do this and it’s interesting to see their decisions being made on the fly and then a cut to the photo they took at the time. Some good examples of accounts I follow are Pierre T Lambert, Framelines, David Wallace Shoots, and Evan Ranft.

Research

Over the last six months I’ve picked up a small number of books too, some as a result of getting interested in Street Photography. The first book I bought was the MAGNUM MAGNUM book by Thames and Hudson publishers, after reading a bit of it in the Shrewsbury library photography section. Some of the photos in there are amazing and it was in introduction to Elliot Erwitt whose work I’d never seen before but love, and also Bruces Davidson and Gilden whose photos I’d seen but never had their names attached to before. Erwitt’s images made me laugh with the humour that’s in them whilst Gilden’s work was a bit uncomfortable to see really as you know how he gets right in people’s faces to capture the image. I think if I did that in London or Birmingham I’d get knocked out.

I then picked up a cheap, and smaller in real life than it looked on ebay, book about Henri Cartier-Bresson one of the pioneers of street photography and founding member of MAGNUM whose images are stark, beautiful and well timed in many cases. There’s some great explanations in that book bout how he became a photographer from being an artist and this is apparent in many of his images.. I’ve even tried to recreate partially one of his images of a cyclist going past some steps and I was happy with my result even if it’s not the same. The leading of the eyes down the stairs worked in my image, I thought, and was happy to get a usable image from around an hour’s worth of hanging around by the bridge.

Street photography is really captivating and I’ve always liked documenting events whether they’re special events or mundane things that we look back ion in the years to come. So I purchased a book called ” Magnum Streetwise” which has some fabulous images in from many different styles of street photographers. CHristopher Anderson is one of the standouts for me in this book with his stylised street images, where another I liked was Martin Parr whose images are just as plain as plain can be , telling the story of the location in one image..

The last book I’ve bought to look through was a return to Elliot Erwitt, it’s a book called “Found Not Lost” and is a collection of a load of pictures never published before that he thought weren’t good enough originally. SOm eof the images in there are spectacular and it’s a real joy to see some of them that aren’t as obviously funny as his more well known work. I’d recommend this as a good book as I keep going back to it for inspiration…

My favourite picture of Erwitt’s is the very clever and simple “Tap”, it’s something that just made me chuckle upon seeing it and one that I love to come across in any book or website.

On the whole then I’m really looking forward to starting a six year part time degree course and at the same time a little trepidatious of what will occur in those six years, but if I don’t try, then I’ll never find out.

I hope you come with me on this journey, even if it’s just myself reading this in six years time to see how far I’ve come…