Well this week V.J. has challenged us with:
As I type up each week’s summary, creating links to various blogs, I am struck by how different blog names are, and compelled to ask: what’s in a name? Specifically, your blog name.
So what is in the name: ‘Pictures without film – Using photos to capture life – Ken Humphreys Photography’
Well I started this blog about four and a half years ago. I had just bought a new camera, a sony a6000. At in its very basic sense, this blog speaks for the fact that I was using a digital camera and not a film camera. I had owned digital cameras before, however this was to be my first interchangeable lens digital, and a mirrorless to boot! While I had owned SLRs I have sort of skipped DSLRs in favor of the CSC. And so this blog was to chart some of my progress.
The blog became a place to post pictures, the occasional quote, and my photographic observations, I generally save other rantings for different social media platforms. Over the years it has also become a place to make friends and find community, digital community that unseen bond that the modern person now shares with people thousands of miles away, who they are never physically likely to meet, but we feel we are in someway sharing part of the path our lives with. To not so ancient humans this would have seemed strange, a magical undefinable realm, a place to which we journey without ever actually visiting. Of course our communities of shared interests have always existed, but never have they been so visible, so tangible, and so perhaps it is magical in its own way.
Of course I mainly blog here by posting my answers to the various challenges that some of you host. I use these to hone my photographic skills, when I am out taking pictures and at home in the digital darkroom.
The subtitle is an important part of my blog title – ‘Using photos to capture life’, Or more specifically my life. My photos are, as so many peoples are a visual diary of what I have done, where I have been. Taking, editing and blogging with just a few of these, allows me to share a little of my ‘captured life’ with you. Of course this is the way I see the world, and not the way you see it, it is not about changing your perspective merely allowing you an insight into the ‘other’, which in this case happens to be me, though the interface of my photos, provided to you not on paper with chemical fixing agents, but though a stream of ones and zeros!
So what is in a name? It is about using my camera to capture the world around me in all of its beautiful and marvelous shapes, recording a small part of my life through a subjective lens, and it is about me sharing this perspective of the world with you.
And given that this blog is generally about photos, I better finish with a subjective view of the author of this post, a photo taken specifically for this blog, which I used as an avatar when the blog was created.
‘Photographer’, 2014.
Ken
