They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating and I suppose the saying holds true. I enjoyed my time with Colin Homes enormously and would recomend it without hesitation. However in good management speak, what has been the impact and what did I learn?
Some aspects were reassuring in terms of my existing practice and my general camera craft stood up reasonably well. I've not long been using the Lee Big Stopper so some aspects of handling that were brushed up. The first part that Colin addressed with us was exposure. This came as a bit of a surprise as I'm reasonably adept at getting well exposed images with a good range of tones. However whether it is due to growing up with colour transparency film or not I have always feared over exposure. Colin pushed us to get our histogram as far to the right as possible I've seen this expressed as ETTR (Exposure to the right). I've never worked that way in the past but seeing files produced have converted. He also taught me to make use of RAW files. I've never been that bothered but working in RAW was a revelation. The final part of the technique slot was given to using Photoshop CS5. I've never gone beyond Elements before but now it has converted me completely.
They say, like with tree rings, that you can estimate the length of a photographic career by the number of bags. This seems to hold true and many of us have a cupboard like the one above. What stands out here is that this follows the ‘clear out to end all clear outs’ last year in which the pages of Ebay were littered with cast offs, mistaken buys and those that seemed perfect at the time but just never seemed to get used. I wondered if some form of retrospective might enable a rounded view of the current state of play. The cupboard isn’t even as full as it might be. there is a Think Tank holster in the car and a Lowepro Rover in the post. There is also of course the usual set of saved web pages listing what may be the next perfect bag or the next mistake. Some things hold true – buy cheap, buy twice is one. there really is no point messing about with cheap fall apart bags as you end up spending more in the end. There is also the very clear rule forgotten by many that there is no such thing as the perfect bag. The best we can ever get is perfect for that particular time, place, weather and equipment.This of course the golden rule that gives us licence to keep buying more and more as each day is different, each location specific and we of course also change our cameras. In episode two we’ll have a look at the current Baglist.