Confessions of a Wannabephotographer

I have to start with how much I have been inspired by photography. Three decades ago, while studying photography as a part of an ‘Art and Design’ course at a university bridging school, my photography teacher said “I can see you’re going to quit. Don’t give up photography. Do it part time as something you do as a single unit but don’t give it up.”

It wasn’t that I was rebelling against his wishes, I just took the Aus-Study back pay I had been waiting for, a one way $200 flight across the country and landed in WA like a drunken sailor that hadn’t seen land in months. All alcohol was included in the price because ‘Compass’ and ‘Ansett’ were having a price war.

21 years of age and ready for the world (or at least my friend who lived in South Perth at the time to come and rescue me from the airport). Naturally as readers you would be thinking that I started exploring photography from here. Well my teacher was right, I should have but I didn’t and all those years of framing scenes with my eye were just for the memory bank. This included swimming with a 35 foot whale shark by myself and watching it descend into the Indian Ocean abyss with flickering warps of sunlight riding its back as it left my view; engulfed by the big blue.

I was born into the analogue versions of cameras that may now feel as though from another epoch close to Pre-Cambrian. I bought one every now and again but never persisted until the digital era arrived. Then my hunger was re-ignited. Yes my friends, I am a true inhabitant of the lazy photographer era and it is here I have found my tribe. You will be starting to get the picture as to why I have taken so long to get to the detail of my secrets because, well, there aren’t any really. At least none beyond that of the half assed digital photographer.

It has only been through the mid-life crisis of undertaking a degree and using every possible angle to scavenge extra marks that I started playing with the medium again. I actually started using my computer and began playing with the photoshop program I had bought 10 years prior on the computer I just started using from the same era. Only now am I saying to myself “Delve deeper. You know you want to.”

My technique is simple. I take a photo with my phones camera and when I want to alter its appearance a little, I simply go into the edit function, choose filter and click on the option I like (Black Coffee). In this case it was quite critical as the photo was for ‘The Little Black Book’ Challenge and in the original photo the book is clearly not black. I even wrote into the text that the cover was worn so that I could still get away with calling it black.

So you can see that my creative mind dictates the terms as I am a finder of solutions, not a surrenderer to obstacles. Once the feature is chosen. Select the tick and you’re nearly done.

To get your photos onto the laptop I use messenger. It’s an easy way to download your photos and again it’s just a matter of using your computer functions to save it in the format you require (JPG or PNG).

Now it’s confession time. The Vocal platform then started using photography language and yeah, you can google it to get it right….. Or…… You can send it to your trusted professional photographer buddy and say to her “Ali they want the photo in this pixel format and my computer doesn’t show me that anywhere as far as I can see. Would you mind tweaking it?” Then you give her the image (which is yours) to get it into the format required. Out of respect you ask her “Do you want me to put up editing credits?” to which she replies “I didn’t do anything.” Hmmm. Well nothing but the very thing that was asked of me.

I looked at the features from my 'photoshop' to play with the brightness, saturation and colour but I wasn’t able to save it in the pixel format required.

Yes, I have a good eye for subject matter, framing the shot, using my imagination to work my way through what is required to get to the final product but I am not the seasoned photographer. So check out www.alisonhoelzer.com.au because she is a genuine professional and one of the last bastion of remaining beautiful human beings that actually care about how people are trekking in their lives and helps out where she can. She made this photo possible…

By M J Hanly March 9th 2021

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