Exercise 2
Review some of your holiday photos.
Without worrying about the quality of the image to begin with, try and remember your motivation for taking them. You’ll probably identify a range of reasons – from wanting to record a view that took your breath away to thinking ‘I’ll never see the Taj Mahal again so I probably ought to take a picture’.
To what extent did you consider the composition, viewpoint or lighting? Did you go back and take a similar shot later in the day, for example? Why did you take a photograph rather than just buying a postcard?
Pick out any images that seem to give you more than just a record of place – images that take you right back there. What are the special qualities of these images? Of course, it’s impossible to isolate the technical elements of the photography from how you felt at the time, what you were doing, who you were with, but try and decide whether the images you’ve selected have anything in common.
Show them to someone who wasn’t there and record their response.
Mobile phones and iPads, in some hands, have taken discrimination away altogether. Now there’s no need to worry about wasting film, you can simply snap away and sort the results out later. Do you think it devalues the final image if little or no thought has gone into the photography?
I have chosen to use my photos that i took at Disneyland Paris in february 2019, (about two weeks before lockdown started due to covid 19). This was a trip I had been planning and saving for, for several years and it meant a lot especially to my eldest daughter who had been desperate to go here for a long time! So obviously the main reasons for taking these photos were to remember and record the iconic features of the place and to have proof of our time there. The photos still prompt some happy memories for me and my children, especially as it was relatively recent.
As we were mostly travelling when I took the photos it was difficult to really consider the framing and details of the photograph. The main goal was to incorporate the Disney towers. The initial photos were taken on our first day there, whereas the polaroid photo was taken on the last day there and includes myself and my children.
Unlike postcards, the photos we have are significantly ‘ours’. They are a documentation of what our actual view was at that moment. There is an imprint to them that comes from us, and the polaroid especially is a physical object that was there with us in the moment, similar to a postcard but more personal.
This picture in particular holds the most powerful memory of the place, because it was one of the first photos I took myself, in my excitement at seeing the castle for the first time. Even the weather didn't particularly concern me and I actually feel now that the sky adds to the reality of the image. It's not a perfect holiday catalogue shot with sunny skies and perfect families. It is a photo that i chose to take with my phone without even stopping or considering the result of the picture.
Without the use of digital technology I think a lot of photo opportunities get missed. In our generation we want to capture everything and have a fear of missing something important, especially in case we forget. Our lives become so busy and hectic, we can become so consumed in daily survival that often we forget to actually look back at these moments. Having taken both a polaroid camera and my iphone, I had both film and digital photographs to record as much as possible of the trip because it was so important to me. The film itself is extremely expensive and works out at least £1 per photograph, so i aimed to only use that film for images that could be considered, where we could stop and take our time to get the photo as good in quality as possible. Whereas with a phone, I could easily take photos as we moved through the day and around the place, so we were able to catch more images as we saw them and they became the photos that were for documentation.
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