Iteration the First

(Reposted from our website)

I am not a great photographer.

Kindly editors have sat me down in their offices to point this out to me on more occasions than I care to remember. Reporters stroll over to my desk to check an image they have sent me on a forty-mile round trip to obtain, at night, in the rain, only to murmur how it is a pity that I seem to have missed the main thrust of the story, or how, despite the pic being just what they wanted, the story has now been dropped.

Total strangers stand in front of my lens at jumble sales and cricket matches, waving copies of last week's paper in my face and demanding to know why their child/spouse/vegetable marrow/prospective Parliamentary candidate was not on the front page/was on the front page/has a green face or, as it may be, only half a face.

I try to say something placatory and blame an Editorial Decision or an Act of God (roughly the same thing), or a drunken Sub, or that the reflection from the moons of Saturn caused an exposure error - anything, in fact, rather than the truth, which is:

I am not a great photographer.

No.

What I am is a competent photographer.

Put me and my Canon in pretty much any situation - ankle-deep in the frozen mud of a sleet-lashed rugby pitch with six feet of visibility and a growing suspicion that the players have already left the field, the awarding of a prize to a child with a nose-picking fixation, or even that most feared of all assignments, an advertising shoot at a beauty salon - and I will come away with some publishable snaps.

Photographers come in a variety of flavours - Wedding, landscape, portrait, glamour, sport - and many, if not most, tend to specialise in one area. As a press photographer I have been called upon to take photos in each of the above categories on the same day (with the exception, sadly, of glamour), all of which require quite different techniques.

And that is what I hope to impart with this blog; with each entry I shall try to pass on some of what we may call, for want of a better term, my photographic skills, and answer any questions - please do send questions, it will save me having to make them up - you may have, particularly if you are new to digital photography.

A tip to start you off:

When did you last clean your lens?

Every time I ask this during the courses I teach, there is a mass shuffling of feet and a lot of guilty expressions. A dirty lens is perhaps the number one cause of unsatisfactory photographs. As the lens on most compact cameras is only about a centimetre wide, a single raindrop or fingerprint (particularly fingerprint) can dull the image. If you have used your camera at the seaside, you will have, take my word on this, a thin crust of salt on the lens.

Any decent photography shop will sell lens tissue for a couple of pounds (ordinary tissue can contain scents that leave a film on your lens, or leave bits behind, or even scratch the glass, but can be used in a pinch). The trick is to be gentle when using it. The same shop should be able to sell you a lens cleaning kit that will have tissue, cleaning fluid (which you put on the tissue, never directly onto the lens), swabs and a 'puffer brush' that removes dust.

These kits are about £6, although I recently found a perfectly decent one for just £1. Lint-free cloth is also available, and this is fine but using it transfers the dirt from your lens to the cloth - and then back onto the lens next time you use it...

Enough for now.

Let me know what you think.