Profiles

Profiles

When I first started taking photographs, the ones I took that people liked were always landscapes or animals. I could take a family portrait without cutting anyone’s head off, but that was about it.

What I seem to have developed a knack for more recently (can you develop a knack?) is taking pictures of people that, while they are far from special, are generally ones that the person in the photo likes. Regardless of anyone else liking them, as someone who has only ever liked half a dozen pictures of me, the best compliment I can get on a portrait I’ve taken is when they are used as a profile pictures on Twitter or Facebook or similar.

Love it or hate it, social media is important and your profile, particularly the picture, is how you’re presenting yourself to the world, so having my photographs as how a dozen or so people choose to do that is very flattering.

It’s only a little thing, they aren’t arty and as I say they aren’t stunning, but it does always make me smile, so here are a few that made me and the subject happy.

Fever Dream

Another Long Division shot

Louise Distras

One of the acts from Long Division

Press Pass

It’s been a few little things that have made me decide to make a go of photography, one of which was getting a press pass for a local festival.

Long Division is a music festival, with bands playing at venues around Wakefield city centre. The first one, last year, was a success. I loved it because it was a fraction of the price of some of the big summer festivals, you don’t spend all day up to your knees in mud and I can walk (stagger) home from it and sleep in my own bed.

Last year I took a few snaps with my mobile phone and put them on Flickr. To my great surprise, someone got in touch, saying they were putting together a presentation on the festival and asking if they could use my photos. Given how many people had a press pass, or just a huge camera, I thought my efforts were well below the standard that should be available, but remembered this year and emailed the organiser.

I ended up with a press pass for this year’s festival and as well as enjoying the music, getting around all the venues during the day, took some shots which I’m really happy with and which I found out later that at least a couple of the acts liked as well.

Spending a day as a ‘proper’ photographer also made me realise that I have views on how a photographer should act and I think I have the start of a style, which I’ll write about another time. Contact with the organisers afterwards was good too but also made me think I needed a better way of editing shots than the playing on my iPad i’d been doing previously.

New scenery

For the last ten years my main focus in life has been law. Having initially studied maths, I converted to a legal qualification, trained and then qualified, about four years ago. I am now a manager in what I believe is the largest family law department in Yorkshire.

I’ve set up this site as a way of charting my efforts to turn myself into a photographer. This isn’t a new career, this is me trying to be good at something creative, that I enjoy. As I seem to be doing it by stages, I thought it would be a good idea to track them, partly for myself but I hope others may find this interesting as well.

I will be adding a couple of posts for things I’ve done recently but once they’re up to date I intend to keep posting as and when I do photoshoots and learn as I go along.

Welcome.