Practice ? again

Practice – again

This is a topic that I keep coming back to – partly because it’s something that we all need to keep doing!

When I was a lad, back in the days of 126 Instamatic film, there was a real cost to learning to take pictures. There was a real premium on learning fast, and not wasting film and money. Work it out: if your first 10,000 pictures are your worst, and you’re using 36-exposure cassettes of 35mm film, that’s roughly three films to 100 shots, 30 to 1,000, and 300 whole rolls of film to reach the 10k mark. My rough calculation is that you’ll spend £4,000 on film, developing and scanning, though you can cut that a lot by learning to develop your own films…



But I digress: if you do it digitally, you can do all of that for very little more than the cost of a camera. The digital revolution has cut costs, and as a bonus, the camera records all the shooting information within the files. So you don’t have to wonder what aperture you shot at, because you can just look in the right place and see it.



I often suggest carrying a camera, because that’s what I’ve done since I stuffed an Instamatic 100 in my blazer pocket at school. I have, on occasion, taken quite a few pictures while commuting by train and bus: made especially easy for me by First Great Western at the start of 2007 when they removed almost all direct services between Thatcham and Slough, so that I had half an hour a day to contemplate my fellow sufferers and the poor souls who worked for that company on Reading station. Yes, I’m still bitter.


This morning, I took a 10-minute stroll along my road with a camera. I shot everything at either 18mm or 55mm, the limits of a basic standard zoom. I shot a comparison of perspective at the two ends (18mm lead, 55mm bottom), I shot an image to demonstrate differential focus at 55mm (a 50mm lens with a 3 stops bigger maximum aperture works so much better…), and a couple of interesting designs I saw. It’s Saturday, so there weren’t many commuters. On a weekday, there are, sometimes in almost pre-Covid numbers.

If you go for a daily exercise walk round the block, take a camera, practice there. You may even end up with a series of images showing the same feature throughout the year… And I promise you, you’ll get better at operating your camera!