From when a rather small boy, perhaps the one notable talent that I had apart from my Mother taking me anywhere twice, the second time to apologise for the first, was the ability to draw. No matchstick men for me, all things had to be drawn in 3D ‘properly’ and that ability was to dominate the first 40 or so years of my life. I went to art school and earned my living as a three dimensional designer but by my 50s being involved in IT, I wasn’t drawing any more.
However over these past 10 years and with an increasing sense of urgency, there has been an inner voice urging me to pick up a pencil (charcoal, Conte, pen, brush etc ), again and rediscover my past skill and the joy doing this once gave me. It has not been easy but gradually the muscle memory is starting to slowly kick in again and a steady progress seems to be underway, I am drawing again and this is a good thing.
Drawing & Photography
It is odd but in recent years I have tried to force myself down this path several times but with little success, I suppose that I must accept that now, for whatever reason, it is the “right time” and previously, it wasn’t.
There is a relationship between my desire to draw and my photography in the sense that I take a lot of photographs and often rather than framing for a complete composition, I will often pick on something and up until now, unconsciously as a reference detail.
I started by focusing in on drawing heads/faces and especially of varying characters rather than just doing a standard drawing exercise. I do have a project in mind where this variation will be important and yet it still is both odd and amusing that all this happens on some kind of auto pilot that doesn’t involve me in conscious decision making.
Another Decision
Although not one of my daily “go to” lenses, one that I acquired some years ago was a Canon 200mm f2.8 L lens which I found particularly useful for early morning wildlife photography. I have always treated it rather like a ‘specialist’ lens where it is ideal for certain situations unlike my trusty 70-200mm f4 L IS zoom which is my go anywhere flexible lens that accompanies me most days.
In recent days I have been using my 200m f2.8 lens because the morning light determined that I needed a fast lens. However and this being I suspect another sign of my ageing, I realised that whilst it was always a front heavy lens, it has reached the point where it has now become too much for me in terms of hand held shooting. Sure, I could easily use it tripod mounted but that wasn’t really the reason I got it for.
Future Upgrades
I think that what this really means is that next time I need to do a trade in against new (to me) camera kit, it will go into the trade in pot. It was this realisation that made me start thinking about what exactly would I upgrade to and what other bits of kit might also get traded in during such a process.
Right now I don’t really need to upgrade anything, I have to hand all the kit that I need for my cathedral project and my day to day photography plus it all depends on the circumstances at the time, what in my mind the need might be and what budget I have available to spend. As a paper exercise I ran though the pieces of kit I would be prepared to ‘sacrifice’ and looked up what they were selling for on a website like MPB. From here I made a guess as to the trade in value I might get and decided that keeping what I had would be preferable.
In fact and with no obligation, I could easily get an on line auto quote from MPB, it’s just that I only do that when I am ready to do a deal and have my eye on something specific which right now I don’t because all my current photographic needs are met by what I have.
Well, that was the plan at the time of writing the above but sometimes circumstances can change … to be continued later.
