I set out a few weeks ago to give photography another try. I had sold the last of my film equipment, my beloved Nikon F5 almost two decades ago, and bought an entry-level digital camera. My work as a writer, an academic and in policy-making had made it difficult to fully embrace photography to the extent that I had in the 1980s, and the arrival of cellular phones with cameras did not make things any easier.
The biggest obstacle in the way of a ‘return’ to photography was ‘post-production’…. My day-to-day work (earning a living) made it virtually impossible to learn digital manipulation, the use of photo-editing and… the arrival of Instagram with its ready to be applied filters, were all a bit too much to take in, what with digital technologies changing as rapidly as they do.
Armed now with a relatively new digital camera, I decided to start out using the camera as if it were an old manual camera, and set the ISO to 400, pretending all the while that I was using a pre-digital era device. I set the camera to monochrome, again, pretending I was using the much preferred old Kodak TriX film we used under most testing conditions. I miss the high contrasts and the grain, but in the digital age all of that can be done in “post-production”. So I’m told….
For the first expedition – it was hardly an assignment – I went to a match stick manufacturing factory in Kota Bharu, in Malaysia’s northern state of Kelantan. The location was quite dramatic. However, the initial results were poor. I had overlooked turning off the autofocus, and the dancing squares of focal points, red that turn to green, then red again did my head in. I was used to manual focus, and framing pictures according to focal points or light sources that I had selected myself. I got some of the framing, and the exposure right, but the pictures were a disaster.
Woman and a funnel of matchboxes
A million matches on the floor and in machines ©ismaillagardien
Still managed to get some of the technical stuff right. The aesthetics will come (fingers crossed). ©ismaillagardien
