A cure for cabin fever
Big vistas are made up of many interesting small details.
Happy New Year! Or should I say happy lockdown - again.
Yep we’re all getting thoroughly cheesed-off being confined to quarters and not being able to get out as much as we’d like to. For me, winter is prime photography time and I had planned to be out and about with my camera in parts of Snowdonia I’ve not visited before and to also photograph other parts of the UK including the Shetland Islands and Outer Hebrides.
Unfortunately, all of that has been put on hold. Last week I resorted to reviewing my insurance policies and tidying my filing cabinet. Oh joy!
As photographers, what can we do if we can’t go out and take photographs? Well, it’s an exaggeration to say we can’t take any photos; we’re simply limited to photographing within our local area. Being based in South Snowdonia, I haven’t really got much to complain about on that front. However, there are only so many photographs I can take of the landscape on my doorstep, so one thing I have been doing is trying to change the type of images that I capture.
When I’m at a location, I instinctively opt to photograph big vistas. I guess most people do. Big scenery is what makes most of us reach for our camera in the first place. However, when I have taken the obvious big vista shot, I then try to look for interesting details in the landscape and I swap a wide-angle lens for a longer telephoto lens (see my blog dated 26th October 2020). I have to work harder to find interesting details that make a compelling image and for me it’s still work in progress, but by the end of the year it would be great if I could have a decent portfolio of images that demonstrate my style of photography has moved on.
Talking of which, I’m also spending more time looking at photography books and considering what style of photography really excites me. Worryingly, the images that make my heart beat faster and which leave me thinking ‘wow’, look nothing like the images I usually take! Which, I guess, is a good indicator that my style does need to evolve.
Inevitably, I have also spent a fair bit of time in front of my computer curating my photo library. Over the years I have amassed a reasonably large library of photographs (just over 40,000 at the time of writing) and every now and again I think it makes sense to revisit my back catalogue and look for gems I may have missed and throw out the no-hopers that take up valuable space on my hard drive.
If you’re one of those people who simply downloads all your photos into a file on your hard drive and then forgets about them, then now is a good time to do a bit of housekeeping and organise them in such a way that you can access them easily in the future. If, for example, you wanted to find photos of your holiday two summers ago, could you easily dig them out, or would it take you ages trawling through an endless stream of images?
The system I have adopted is simplicity itself (I can only do simple!). I file my images by year and then within each year I create sub-files by photo project. Looking back at 2020, for example, I have a sub-file for all the photos I took on my Antarctica trip (and I also have sub, sub-files for each region we visited on the trip); I also have a sub-file for all photos taken in Aberdyfi; another sub-file for all photos taken of my grandchildren ……..and so on. As I said, it’s simple and it works for me.
On a final note, another important issue to consider is how best to keep your precious photos safe. There are plenty of back-up options available and it doesn’t really matter if you decide to back-up to the Cloud or back-up to hard-drives. The choice is yours. What really matters is that you back-up. If you have all your photos on a computer that’s not backed-up, you’re at great risk of losing them. I’ve had several hard-drives fail over the years. It’s not a question of ‘if’, but ‘when’.
Living with lockdown has certainly disrupted normal photographic activities, but there are nonetheless things that can be done to use the downtime productively.
Let’s just hope we can all resume normal service sooner rather than later.