From the Cape to the Point ...

Cold Fire ...

I've had a camera – in one form or another – for more than three years now. A Canon A520 was swiftly replaced by the mighty S3 IS and, a year ago – after two years of heavy work, it gave way to the Nikon D60, a DSLR without auto-bracketing or intervalometer. These cameras, and the pictures they've taken, have taught me much and stand to teach me far more than I can imagine right now – not all of it about photography.

I've been fiddling with images over the past couple of weeks; making photographs. In the processing, a couple of lived truths have coalesced to realised thought.

First, a generic image, direct from the camera, is raw material for many more. No iteration of one picture is merely a copy – it is another photograph altogether. Secondly, these photographs bring themselves into being. All I can do is try to draw them out. I cannot make a photograph that does not reside in the material given me, but I can make countless with that which is there. What I draw out or 'extrude' is up to me, my native imagination, my ill-informed knowledge of what is possible, and my hammer-and-chisel skills on decidedly unremarkable computing equipment.

Suburban Warfare ...

Despite having accumulated tens of thousands of images, I'm driven to go out and take more as I find new ways of building, making, expressing, framing, or bringing photographs into being. A vast, unfathomable reservoir of possible photographs grows way beyond my capacity to process it. My filing is up to shite and I'm clueless as to how I get from A to B. I've no idea what informs my approach to each picture other than a vague restlessness to move it towards what I feel it to be. That state of being is extremely subjective – and dependent on space, time, place, and where my head is at as it juggles and shifts shades of light through trial and error.

Convergence ...

I have ascertained what others like to see, and am pleased that they occasionally do so. (I'll be forever indebted to colleagues for their criticism, advice, and feedback.) Frequently though, I find myself wondering at the bland perfection of a picture well received. I've a feeling I like to get my pictorial hands dirty rather than aim for qualified or restrictive conformity.

As for processing, there comes a time to stop. Either the image is made to the best of my ability or I have failed to make anything of it. It is either a photograph or it is not and I'm the arbiter of my success or lack thereof. I'm comfortable with what I see or I'm not; rested in its finality or dissatisfied with elements of it, ready to let it be or content to let it revert to raw material I can revisit. For a graphic illiterate, this is a fascinating education in what motivates me, in what I see and feel, and in what I choose to communicate or keep hidden – for much of the content of my galleries is decoy material, written off but not removed, the trappings of a former self left to mislead.

Into the sun ...

Finally, and I guess most importantly for this dilatory blog, Mike Golby's Cape Point has grown geographically from where I took that first shot of the caverns beneath Cape Point's cold sea cliffs – and decided to follow the lens to the chill tunnels leading into the rock, to encompass the Cape Peninsula or anywhere else I might find myself with my camera. It's a qualitative shift from chronicling images of a place to trying, wherever I find myself, to discern the photograph in what I see.

I guess I should now admit it – photography's becoming something of a hobby for me. And yep, I will grow out of the D60, move on to more advanced cameras and better lenses, and – one day – get that shot I'm looking for.