I noticed today that I hadn’t taken many pictures, nor posted any, of the conception of the Photographing Consciously Workshop. The story is a pretty one. It all started with a dream…
No really, it did, more or less. A long time ago, I can’t really remember when, but sometime between the creation of the universe and me thinking of writing this blog post, was the first time that I read a photography tutorial and heard of photographers teaching their craft to others. That is when it occurred to me that not only are these things useful to look into, but might be fun to actually do myself. I spent a while, a few years, dreaming about how that might be pleasant, and then one day, when this idea nearly slipped into the realm of the forgotten, I went over to a fellow photographer’s house, a friend of mine who is as much (if not more) of a fan of the Moleskine notebooks as I am.
On his shelf, next to his beautiful 1940s Leica rangefinder camera, I found a barely-written-into Moleskine medium sized notebook with an obvious binding defect in it. Long story short, my friend noticed the flaw, emailed Moleskine and of course due to their impeccable customer support, received a replacement swiftly. He never got around to throwing the old one out. Well …there I was, thinking exactly the same thing you are thinking now. Why throw it out? He agreed to let me have it after tearing out the few pages he wrote on. I was very pleased!
After a little sticky tape treatment, the notebook was not as new, but was usable, and in my view looked stylish, in an old used kind of way. This sparked an idea in my mind. This notebook was going to be the home to my very own photography workshop that I could share with others interested to learn. After a lot of thinking as to where to start, I decided to make it, not about techniques per se, but about approach. I personally find that as long as what you do with your camera is done on purpose and for a reason, aka you aim to leave as little to chance (in terms of camera settings) as possible, you will be closer to get a desired result than if you just set the camera to Auto mode. So I named my workshop “Photographing Consciously”, I took a whole lot of notes on separate sheets of paper (in order to not fill the notebook with temporary scrap notes) and once I was done I started writing. I gotta say it was a lot of fun. Every now and then I would bestow upon my favourite notebook blessings of coffee, some by mistake,at first, some later on because I noticed the marks left looked cool. Here are some iPhone photos (taken with the Hipstamatic app) of the notebook, still surviving and still just as cool. If you feel inspired, check out the details about the Photographing Consciously Workshop.
