January 2024, Shooting While Aging

Happy New Year!

Keeping you informed about happenings at Deliberate Light: photos to browse or buy, photography instruction (see also Digital Photo Academy), and services. Also, my thoughts on a photography subject: this month, Shooting While Aging. To get these newsletters by email a month before they are posted here, go to the DeliberateLight.com website and click on Newsletter Signup.

NEWS

Upcoming Workshops. I am scheduled to teach the following workshops this month.

January 20, location: 30th Street Station, Philadelphia
Completed in 1933 by the old Pennsylvania Railroad, its spacious main waiting room is faced with travertine marble and has a rich gold, red and cream coffered ceiling. Large columned porte-cocheres on the east and west ends of the building lend a classical air that blends nicely with the art deco style interior. Huge windows and skylights make for some wonderful light, contrasting with the often-forgotten dark corners. The alternately vast and intimate spaces in the station provide plenty of opportunity to study different ways to approach perspective, line, and light in photography, with composition tips from your instructor.

· Mastering Your Camera Controls (1.5 hours) – DSLR/Mirrorless/Compact cameras (smartphone tutorial available separately)

· Composition in the Field (3 hours) – walking tour around the venue with instruction and hands-on practice composing photos (bring any camera)

The next group classes I teach in Philadelphia will be March 16.

New Photo. A walk around my neighborhood on a surprisingly mild November afternoon was a pleasant diversion from the depressing Covid epidemic. The little crocus peeking out of the decaying fallen leaves seemed sweetly hopeful, a reminder that even as things grow old, they also grow anew.

(Rose Valley, PA, 2021)

For a more detailed, enlarged view and to get it printed, see it on my website.

VIEWS

I am getting old. Finally, in my 75th year, I feel like I can and probably should say I am old. In many ways, getting old is wonderful (for example, I can do all the photography I want), but it also has decided challenges. I have aching knees and hips, sometimes searingly, that I never used to have, so walking is usually the best I can muster. Lifting things can hurt a lot now and I am not as steady as I used to be. I had cataract surgery, which made a huge difference, but the sight in my right eye is still getting incorrectably worse. I have more difficulty focusing my eyes on small details quickly, especially details against bright backgrounds.

I am not telling you all this as a play for sympathy because I know many people have it a lot worse. Rather, this is a lead-in to the topic of how to continue doing photography despite such challenges, aging being something we all experience and that is if we are lucky. Denial really does work but only up to a point, and then it is more effective to find ways to accept and deal with it if you want to keep enjoying shooting. For anything that has no good medical fix, figure out how to either compensate for it or, more fun, embrace it.

Compensate For It. This is largely about using equipment – helpful to know if you don’t already, but mostly just obvious fixes.

· For vision loss:

§ Mobile phone cameras:

· Android tablet or iPad has a much larger camera monitor

· Android Accessibility Magnification or iOS Magnifier app.

· Use Apple VoiceOver or Android TalkBack to control camera.

§ Use autofocus on a digital camera: at some point, I just stopped trusting my eyes for sharp focus.

§ Use photo editing apps (like Lightroom). Example: shoot wide if you cannot see clearly what to include or how to level, then crop/straighten during editing.

· For dexterity/strength loss.

§ Lighter equipment, e.g., smartphones or bridge cameras.

§ Zoom lens for less physical moving, quicker shooting, and less physical handling.

§ Tripod to steady the camera.

§ Use the image stabilization camera feature to compensate for hand-shake.

§ Remote or timed shutter control eliminates the impact of pressing shutter button.

§ Automation, e.g., aperture-led mode, auto WB, or auto ISO. Reduces physical manipulation, especially when shooting fast.

Embrace It. Honestly, this is much cooler stuff than the preceding. It represents an opportunity to explore something different.

· Slow down. As you get older, things get slower anyway. Why not embrace it by choosing subjects you can take your time with? You will find it allows you to find the best view rather than just snapping and moving on. For me, this has meant more landscape, portrait, artifact, and architecture photography like this …

2023

… and less street, event, or sports shooting that require faster shooting like this.

2019

By being slow and careful, I am rewarded by a deeper appreciation of the subject.

· Deliberately blur to allow for loss of acuity and steadiness. Embrace imperfection and go for abstraction by moving the camera on a long exposure:

Or loosen up with subject motion blur to represent movement:

· Show what you see, even if you are losing color or everything is blurring. For example, don’t fight color loss, just take it all the way to black-and-white, which, after all, used to be considered the only possible fine art photography.

An incredible example of going with how things look in the present is this painting by Claude Monet of his Japanese Bridge. As you must know already, he painted this bridge repeatedly for decades, this one being completed just a year before he gave in and had cataract surgery. Impressionism taken to abstraction by letting the blurring show along with the shift from whites, greens and blues towards purple, red and yellow tones. Powerful stuff, especially when compared to his previous paintings of this bridge.

Claude Monet, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Carl Finkbeiner

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