Learning
For all my anxiety around losing things I had no trepidation about bringing my camera to Europe.
The “adult camera” had gotten minimal usage my freshman and sophomore year of college, partially because of my iPhone. My smartphone’s images were getting better, it was as simple as point and shoot, and the convenience couldn’t be beat.
Taking my Canon Rebel t2i, even though it was relatively compact, still felt kinda bulky, it also attracted attention. I was also struggling to learn how all of the different dials interacted with one another.
By college I had learned a little bit about how to set the camera up, but I was still slightly overwhelmed by all the calculations I had to make to correctly compose an image. The random blur, lights bleeding, darkness obfuscating everything, made it feel like I was attempting handwritten long division to solve an image, as opposed to making a few clicks into a compact calculator to get to a desired outcome.
There were three icons on the dial that I started to test in those first couple years. The first one I tried was “manual,” which I could not figure out but a pair of friendlier icons — the shutter priority and aperture priority mode — were more inviting.
At this point I settled on the shutter priority, letting the camera determine the aperture for each shot. To my understanding a higher base number on the shutter meant it was bright outside and there was a lot of light available, a lower number meant it was dark.
That’s what got through to me, I lacked the ability to calculate depth.
It took me way too long to sort out how shutter, aperture, focus and ISO, all could be manipulated together in ways that best captured an image. Being somewhat ambidextrous I still catch myself mixing up left and right, so adding more directions just further complicates things.
I started to learn through trial and error how the camera’s manual focus worked by adjusting a ring around the exterior lens, but didn’t grasp how the aperture impacted the sharpness of the foreground and background of an image.
It was a good thing I was able to learn about the camera’s internal training wheels available through these priority modes, and that I remembered to keep them locked on.
While I didn’t have much motivation to trek around campus with the dslr during some rough winters and a decent amount of coursework, I still would bring it with me to campus each semester.
But when the prospect of studying abroad became real, I knew that I wanted to let this camera document what could very likely have been a once in a lifetime trip. That’s an overused phrase “once in a lifetime,” if you broke apart every breath you take then each could be noted in its own passing of a moment. To fixate on capturing them all would hinder the physical need. Much like giving thought to blinking, the conscious effort around the subconscious rhythm brings a friction to your bodily function.
Travel was something new, a different way of breathing, like going for a light jog after building up your lung capacity from routinely ramping up your miles.
Instead of logging miles there was imagery I had been collecting.
My grandfather had travel photos on his walls, mantle, desk and other pieces of furniture throughout his home posing with my grandmother in front of iconic landmarks. The images in a subtle way, change as I get older. The host of scenescapes in my grandparents’ home didn’t look real to me when I was a kid, but after traveling and starting to experience a change in my age, they became more tangible. The distance between my grandparents’ ages and mine were shifting and my travels could help me feel as though I met them in a moment.
With my study abroad program I had intended to visit all of my ancestral homelands. I’d be based in London for the semester — no genetics there — but had a course planned in Ireland so the latter covered one ancestry. Then I just needed Italy, Germany, and Scotland to round out my makeup.
In plotting out these destinations I had come to better understand the auto-modes on my camera, I did not tweak the f-stop, I still did not fully understand what/how it manipulated the image in tandem with the shutter speed. So I kept to my understanding of shutter speed and its interaction with light:
sunny days — increase the value;
less light and dimly lit spaces — decrease the value.
That’s the rudimentary knowledge that got me pretty much all of my travel photos.
Even though I took a photo class abroad it was not the one I intended to sign up for. Instead of the one that was a set of assignments, where you were meant to take a bunch of photos, I signed up for one that dealt with the business side and ethics in photojournalism. We had one day where the class was just a photo assignment of walking around town but I wish each lesson built off of that. The course was kind of handy because some of the talks we went to took me to new parts of the city I otherwise would not have ventured to.
I’m mostly salty about the course because it was meant to be an easy elective and I only got a B+ because the professor didn’t “believe in A’s,” but otherwise it was a good learning experience. It also helped that at this point in my coursework a single grade did little to alter my GPA, but the grades, to my current experience, have been irrelevant post-graduation. At the time I was interested in law school and thought that minor changes to my GPA could have a significant impact on scholarships.
What I found most useful about the one shooting assignment was just being told to go out and take photos and then bring them back for the class to review. Outside of learning all the different calculations I need to make to catch a given image, I find just getting in the practice of intentionally taking images to be the trickiest part about improving my photos.
I was fortunate that some of the auto-settings I had entered properly aligned to hold a memory here and there during my time abroad. Other students, far more talented than me, were able to take really detailed images. Their images made photography seem more accessible, I felt an internal nudge to continue trying.
It was also very useful that my coursework from that semester started to push me towards issues surrounding media and communications. That got me to take more classes where I was able to better understand my camera and feel as though I was catching my breath, expanding my capacity for making photographs.
