Working from home - Shocking
Pentax 645Z - 75 secs @ f11, iso 100 - 12th August 2020, 9:30pm
Shocking
In the last 12 months or more we have all had a ‘shake up’. Our daily lives changed and our own safety considered every day. It’s been difficult.
During COVID many of us have had a change of routine to working from home. For some, this is not ideal, for others it’s a bonus. For many it’s just good that a job still exists in these unusual times.
Whilst putting together this reincarnation of my markhughesphotography.com website, I have been sorting through my back catalogue of images from back to around 2004 where my love of landscape was rekindled. Back as a 16 year old in 1986 (yes I am that old…) I got the bug for photography (film back then) and joined a local club for about a month! ‘O’ level revision (with the promise of a job if I was successful) curtailed my photography bug and then the start to my working life did the same.
I never lost the bug it was just dampened by the usual things in life at that age. I continued to take images but on an ad-hoc basis.
In 2004 I was married and we had just had our son, Lewis. I bought a small Olympus Mju digital camera to capture images of Lewis and days out, holidays etc. On one of the first holidays we ventured on we discovered a new part of the Welsh coast. With no real entertainment to speak of on the evenings I found myself capturing landscape images of the coast and beaches. It rekindled my interest.
Since that time I have been photographing, processing, learning on the job, reading, watching and gaining experience. My first ‘serious’ camera was a Nikon D70 and I have progressed in terms of technique, style, quality and cameras ever since.
Anyway, I digress! Sorting through my ‘back catalogue’ of images has been a wonderful experience, recalling locations forgotten, finding images of both of my children on holidays…you get the picture (pun intended).
The image above was taken fairly recently and it helps to highlight how photography does not necessarily mean travelling to the ‘honey pots’ of landscape photography in the UK - such as Glen Coe or the Cornish coast.
The ‘image’ is shocking from every sense - including from a technical standpoint. Rain spots spoil the image, its been quickly over processed with noise issues and there was little option in the choice of composition - I cropped to a square format to remove a telephone pole - and why? It was taken during a huge thunderstorm from my front porch! You don’t get much closer to home working than that!
As Landscape photographers well know the image never shows the effort or conditions at the time. The sheltering from a blizzard, the hands stiff with cold, the jeans soaked to the skin under heavy rain waiting for the light. In this instance it was raining but was almost pitch black apart from the street lighting. I thought I had cleaned the lens of rain drops and for the majority of the images I had...except the one that captured the best lightning bolts - and that’s another issue with landscape photography - conditions have to play ball for you to get ‘that shot’.
I guess this shot is on my website to prove there are dramatic images everywhere and its a case of using your camera and getting out and about…something I have not done for a while having lost my photographic mojo. This is returning and with it, I hope, some new images to search through in my back catalogue and to print.
So my first new blog on the new website is of a technically poor image, with no landscape to speak of and taken from my porch. I guess things can only improve from here…
