In order to finally feel involved in the unstoppable force of time-worn cliche that pervades the start of every new year, and heralds the beginning of everyone’s least favourite month, I have at last made a New Year’s Resolution. The making of New Year’s Resolutions is not a ritual that I have ever before taken part in, mainly because I already spend the majority of my time making small-scale resolutions throughout the year, on a shamefully regular basis.
New Month Resolutions, New Week Resolutions, New Day Resolutions…. not as catchy from a marketing viewpoint – especially for companies attempting to sell yoghurt to post-christmas slobs – but much more realistic if you ask me. In all honesty, the regular pacts I make with myself are less resolutions, and more desperate attempts to rake my life into some kind of credible order by altering the most unacceptable of my habits: ‘Biscuits are not breakfast’. ‘Start going for runs’. ‘Stop ticking things off your To Do List when all you’ve really done is write a reminder to do it on a post-it note and stuck it to the mirror.’ ‘Stop actually finding Keeping Up with the Kardashians funny.’ ‘Stop procrastinating by dressing up the dog and pretending she’s in a photoshoot for Grazia.’ ‘Start eating fruit, and not just carrying it around in your bag until it eventually rots into the corner and ferments.’ ‘Buy a new bag.’
However, I have a feeling that my very first New Year’s Resolution has a chance of being achieved, if not for the sole reason that it has cost me a down payment of £320 already. And for someone who is currently living off the remnants of a student loan and £10-a-page freelance copywriting work, forking out such an amount does great things for your resilience and determination. So what is my resolution? Simply this: get a proper camera and learn how to use it.
Part one of my resolution was fairly easily achieved, after a swift browse of the Amazon sale. Part two however, may not come so easily. Apart from the fact that I approach technology of any kind with equal measures of scepticism, fear, mistrust and weighty guidebook tomes, I also have an inherent prejudice which may hold me back. The prejudice in question is what I have affectionately termed ‘Photography Legend Syndrome’. In simple terms, this phenomenon occurs when your everyday average-Joe (although I hate to generalise, it is usually a man apparently suffering from acute mid-life crisis) acquires a semi-decent, SLR camera, and is transformed in his own head from father-of-four-daily-commuter to the prolific lovechild of Ansel Adams and Annie Liebovitz – Photography Legend Syndrome.
I first encountered PLS at the tender age of 19, whilst staring in awe and wonder at the incredible sight of Machu Picchu in Peru, a sight which I had worked jolly hard to witness by completing a four-day hike through less than savoury conditions and camping on the edge of cliffs in a tent that appeared to have been purchased from the Ikea children’s section. Just as I was experiencing a moment very close to existential perfection whilst gawping at one of the seven wonders of the new world, I was violently and unceremoniously shoved to one side by the unnecessarily intrusive lens of a prime PLS sufferer’s Nikon, as he crouched down, adjusting his aperture and snapping away as though he was in charge of National Geographic’s autumn cover-shoot. And so began my lifelong prejudice.
As much as this moment was truly formative in my young life, I can’t help but be reluctantly enchanted by the idea of photography itself. Poet and artist Charles Baudelaire once penned a piece of work called The Painter of Modern Life, in which his imaginary visionary ‘Monsieur G’ manages to capture the vitality and perfection of single moments in time by painting in a primal, uninhibited and above all, rapid manner. Following this line of logic, it makes sense that the modern camera is able to take Monsieur G’s work to its logical conclusion, as nothing can capture a moment in time more rapidly than a photograph. Perhaps this is what I find so fascinating about photography itself; every picture is an unequalled instance of sublimity, a crystallised moment of reality captured perfectly in a single, visual image.
With Baudelaire’s abstract theories in mind, I decided it was now time to do my own bit of moment-crystallising with my new camera. So I headed to the zoo, because nothing tests your manual-focusing skills like trying to get a good shot of a faraway chimp behind some grimy, cage bars. Before I arrived, I admit I was a tad apprehensive that we would look like prime losers battling through hordes of toddlers and weary parents, with hefty camera equipment on industrial straps around our necks, desperately trying to capture a fleeting image of a lemur by pressing extended lenses up against the smeared glass of their enclosures. Oh my, how utterly wrong I was.
My trip to the zoo was nothing short of enlightening, and not only with regards the purposes of my camera’s various settings. It was here that I experienced my first bout of a phenomenon known as ‘lens envy’. According to the Urban Dictionary, lens envy occurs when one SLR owner passes another whose camera lens is unquestionably superior, and both acknowledge this fact with a single, exchanged look of respective shame and smugness. I exchanged such looks with practically every middle-aged father and a number of middle-aged mothers that I happened to pass during my day at the zoo. Due to my, frankly pathetic lens, (the condition of which was only worsened following a licking incident with an over-friendly giraffe),my attempts at animal close-ups consisted mainly of climbing on fences, elaborate leaning, and trying to encourage the selected animal closer to me with a series of forest-calls that Bill Oddie would be proud of. A sub-optimal method, and one which, at best, could only produce shots like these:
At one stage, whilst gathered around an enclosure of lions who happened to all be blissfully sunbathing in an adorable heap in a nearby corner, I grew so dissatisfied with the distorted, over-exposed photos, ruined by glass-reflections and hopelessly blurry due to my being shoved by a vast number of PLS sufferers, that I uttered a highly controversial sentence: “Oh, I’m not getting any good photos at all. Maybe its time to just… look with our faces instead…?” This utterance was met with a collective glare from the PLS Brigade, one wheeling around from snapping the lions to do so with such speed, that he almost took out a small child with his ridiculously oversized lens-hoodin the process. It was then made clear that I had not started a revolution of consciousness, whereby we all would lay down our cameras, join hands and enjoy the sight of the lions together with only our naked eyes, using only our humble memories to recall the moment in the future, but what I had in fact done was revealed myself as a weak link in the crowd, and was instantly ejected from it entirely, camera and all. Without my negative vibes weighing them down, the PLS Crew proceeded to resume their shoot with more vigour and determination than before, practically shouting at the lions to “come on, Vogue!!” as they did so.
And so, if there is one thing I have learnt from this is experience, it is that if I want to distil beautiful moments in time through the art of expert photography, I need to harden-up. Until then, I think I might stick to the mantra of using my eyes first and camera second, in order to avoid viewing life, forever more, through a distinctly sub-par lens…