Add to Set

I WAS privileged along with a posse of other photobloggers to be part of the Add to Set exhibition that is currently taking place in Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. Among those participating in the month-long exhibition are Iced Coffee, Alan in Belfast, John, Good on Paper, Claire. Here's what I wrote about it before and you can also read the Trans Belfast blog on the event here . On two walls there is an ecliptic mix of everyone’s images and it was interesting to hear people’s reactions to the pics not knowing who took the image. I was delighted at one stage that one woman pointed out one my pics and then another one which was a couple of prints away.





Before the exhibition was officially opened (second floor of the Waterfront do go see it if you have a chance) there was a panel discussion on the future of photography.

I am late coming to this as it happened last week but I have been aware that I should put something together from the event which was informative and fun, so here you go. While this is certainly not a definitive account of what was discussed in the event, these are some of the thoughts that stayed with me afterwards.

The panel discussion featured Pennie Smith, John Baucher and acting Photo editor of the Irish News Hugh Russell, (who incidentally 22 years ago took a pic of me for the Irish News when I was in a school play which I still have somewhere). Also on the panel were two people from Belfast Exposed.



There is a discussion on Flickr about the contribution from the two Belfast Exposed pimping their organisation rather than really getting into the debate. And while I would agree to a point, I also think some valuable points were made by them concerning deletion.

[I have to say as an aside I do have a fondness for Belfast Exposed having run into their darkrooms in occasions in the past for emergency printing as well as taking part in some of their masterclasses. While this was a few years ago I don't know if photographers find it as accessible as it used to be.]

So do we delete or not? Say you take a load of pics and only use a couple. What happens to the rest, what do you do with them? Personally I have them all clogging up my puters both in work and at home. I filled a work PC within a year of pics until there was not enough memory to even delete a word document. At that stage I bought a spare hard drive, now they are all sitting in that.

I have been thinking for a couple of years now (and all the while taking more and more images) that I need to sort them, somehow. At one stage I would ask some of the news photographers that I come across what do they do for storage/archives, so far I haven’t gotten a solution but I imagine the last thing they would do is delete images. After all in that regard there are bound to be instances when images can reveal different things over time. This is one problem that I will have to overcome at some stage, as I cannot rely on Flickr or Pix.ie as an online archive, though I do to some extent. Pennie also raised this in relation to her back catalogue of work, and the huge amount of work involved in digitising it, which up to now she hasn't done.

Another point raised in the debate by Hugh Russell is that we no longer print and to a large extent that is really true. Unlike before when film was the order of the day images were printed, now we snap even more and they sit in a hard drive, we no longer print pictures.

There is no doubt though that companies such as Blurb and Shutterfly, which both provide a reasonably priced service can help to change that. If you are in the States you can print through your Flickr account and maybe that is something that Pix.ie could do here.



Pennie Smith revealed that despite being a music photographer she hates music and she still uses film. While she can see some benefits to digital (such as pushing in low-light conditions) she prefers film. She also spoke about how her images are bootlegged all over the place, including in the Trans Belfast brochure.

'Dogs don’t buy newspapers', Hugh Russell said at one point recalling a former picture editor referring to publishing an image of a dog in the paper. You only need to look at what local newspapers, generally, put on their front page (cute kiddies) to know this to be true. He spoke of how the content of images has changed in Northern picture desks in recent years, less troubles therefore less hard news. Like many of the others he spoke of how a photographer should know film to master digital photography.

Interestingly while he uses digital all the time in work, if he is doing something like a family wedding or special event, he uses film.

I have to say as well there is nothing like being in a darkroom, from the smell of the chemicals to the actual process of printing your image. It is also worth noting that being the best photographer in the world doesn’t mean you can print an image worth a damn. I was once told it takes seven years to become a master printer, it is an art form in itself.

I loved printing from the first time I tried it and I am not in the slightest inferring that I am in anyway a master, far from it. Being in a darkroom makes you realise your mistakes too, such as a badly exposed image. If you have exposed an image badly, it shows up massively in the printing stages. A little knowledge is also a dangerous thing, the more you know about printing, the more you realise that a print you did before and may have loved, is actually a shite print, with little contrast, or whatever. I know this from experience ;)

“If you are good in the darkroom you’ll be good in the lightroom,” Hugh added.

Which brings me to the digital bit. Digital has made photography accessible which is the key for me. I have darkroom equipment but at one stage couldn’t do anything with it because I just couldn’t afford it. Therefore my film camera sat unused and unloved. I kept thinking at some stage this would change and I would get my photography mojo and money to do it.

But it wasn’t until I got my digital camera that this changed, all of a sudden I could snap what I wanted. I didn’t have to eek a roll of film out, being economical with every shot. After all each frame literally costs money, so why shoot something in 36 shots when it can be done in three or four frames. Not so with digital, hence the ridiculous amount of images I have clogging up my hard drives.

At the end of the day, however, a badly exposed shot is still a badly exposed shot whether it is digital or film. Just because it is digital does not mean that you have a magic wand that will enable you to take better pics. But at least you can kinda tell whether or not you have your shot in ways you never could before with film.

I am still learning with digital. In some ways things were clearer with film, for black and white expose for the low lights and in colour expose for the highlights was the general rule. Now I find myself taking shots a little darker in attempts to not blow out clouds or the white detail. Bracketing is also my best friend.

So I suppose on one hand, the message from the panel that you should know film to know digital is spot on. But at the end of the day a good eye is a good eye and all these other things can be learned. So don’t be disheartened if you have come to photography via your digital camera, just learn your craft, keep trying and keep snapping. And to quote Eve Arnold who once wrote in an autograph to me ‘make all your negs be in focus’ or indeed jpeg or raw images.

Stumble It!