Fine Art Photography

By Dominic Donaldson

 I’m old enough to remember a time when taking photos was expensive and time consuming. Film came in standard rolls of 24 or 36 and developing took the best part of a week. Simpler times maybe; there was certainly more of an effort made to get the picture right first time because it wasn’t possible to delete something on the spot and try again, but it also meant that not as many photos were taken and so some very important occasions were never snapped and the only thing that was left was a memory.

Today, of course, things are very different. Most people, and I count myself among them, have cameras that can take hundreds or even thousands of pictures without the need to reload film or visit the local chemist to get them processed. The result is that people now take hundreds of photos where they might once have only taken two or three.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, as I’ve discovered from speaking to several people, it enables events and occasions to be documented far more thoroughly. Rather than signal the death of the photo book or album it has in fact breathed new life into it. Where, once, it would have taken weeks or months to fill a photo book, now it can be done in a day. This has opened up the possibility of preserving single events beautifully in a photo book quickly and for all to see.

Photo books used to be filled with photos that had been taken over a long period of time. The first page may have had a picture on it that was taken years before the photo on the back page. Nowadays it’s quite possible that every picture in a photo book was taken on the very same day. The abundance and variety of images it is now possible to take means that the photo book need never look the same again.

Holidays - Let’s start at the most obvious place; the family holiday. In the past a two week family holiday would have meant two, perhaps three, rolls of film with about one hundred pictures. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to take that many in a day. As a result the family holiday photo book can look a lot more dynamic and tell a much more interesting story. With the option to take twenty photos of a single subject you have the ability to edit the result while putting the photo book together; you no longer have to settle for second best.

Children - Anyone who’s ever had children will now that while you’re in the think of it, changing nappies, feeding, dealing with tantrums, the whole experience can feel like an eternity. However those same people will also tell you that, only a short time down the line, it seems to have flown by. Very often those first precious memories are lost, but with a digital camera that can be picked up on the spur of the moment and can hold thousands of images before anything more involved has to be done, those memories needed be lost.

A photo book of a child’s first year makes a wonderful memento for your family. It even makes a wonderful gift for grandparents. Most of all though it’s a great record of a time that can sometime feel frustrating but is guaranteed to be looked back on with extreme fondness one day.

Restoration Project - A slightly more unusual use for digital cameras and the subsequent wealth of images that inevitably come from them is project documentation. House-builds, motorbike restoration, garden landscaping and simple decorating all make ideal subjects for a photo book.

Dominic Donaldson is an expert in the photography industry.

Find out more about the Photo Book and presenting photographic images.

Photography

fine photography