Human.bandwidth

My son has taken photography for one of his A - level subjects at school so we got him a DSLR camera to learn from. It means stepping away from the smart phone and computer to learn a tool. It happens to be the tool of my trade, the camera.

It takes me back to when I was where he is. My first camera was the Pentax K1000. I bought it second hand in Cape Town for three hundred South African Rand, which was my whole monthly allowance twenty five years ago. And it cost more to run than today’s cameras. In those days, instead of a reusable sd card, my Pentax needed a roll of disposable 35mm film which also needed to be processed and the price of that was considerably more than a loaf of bread. Each roll of film had 36 frames—36 snaps I could take, sometimes I may have gotten two extra photos out of a roll if I were lucky. Still there was little room for error. Getting the wrong exposure or an out-of-focus shot meant less reward for the same financial outlay. I later learnt many of the mistakes I thought I had made were not my mistakes at all. The printing process needed specific settings for each print in a roll of film, but because it was mass produced, the printers took an average based on the correct exposure for the first few frames. If later I had an image with high contrast or a different lighting scenario to those first few frames, that print would come out incorrectly exposed—usually underexposed. So, although many errors were mine—some of them were not but the printers never told me that. Their profit margin would diminish substantially if they’d been honest about their process.

There have always been two parts to taking pictures: the Technical and the Creative. The Technical part to photography in those days were F-stops or aperture, shutter speed and focus. Colour temperature or white balance and film speed or ISO was decided by the type of film stock you bought. I used to buy Fuji 400 ASA daylight colour film—that would cover my range of photos and the times of day I required. And then the Creative: subject matter, composition and the way you see the world. That’s where my learning trully started.

It was with this paradigm I made sense of the world and taught myself to see. It was the starting point; a set of limitations in a very big and confusing space filled with all sorts of complexities. The camera was somewhere to base myself, an anchor point to hold me in place long enough to build a foundation to look out from and determine a direction to move forward into.

Now the world has moved on, technological power has grown faster than moral understanding. Is it time to find a new limitation relevant to today similar to what the camera once offered, a new anchorage to hold one in place long enough to learn to see from way out here?

Perhaps that’s the purpose for this series of writing in Human.bandwidth.