For me, the worst part of the illustration process is the bit where I have no choice but to interact with a computer. Mostly, that happens when I’ve finished all the artwork for a book and I need to take photos to share them with the publisher.
Maybe it’s partly because I want to take really good photos. After all, this is the first time a publisher will experience the images I’ve spent months labouring over. To take a few phone snaps in bad lighting, to me, doesn’t feel like the best way to present that work. What I want is for the publisher to gasp, grin, and fall over with delight. To maximise the publishers’ emotional response in that way requires more.
And so, for years, I’ve been snapping away, on auto-mode, with a pretty decent SLR, trying to get the best result I can. But, I’ve never been able to get it right – the colours aren’t vivid or correct enough, the image is never quite straight on, the exposure isn’t consistent. I didn’t want to invest in really complex setups (professional lighting rigs etc) just for a few photos. Surely there were cheaper and more space-saving alternatives. Surely!
Recently (and completely unrelated to the problems I had with taking photos of my art), I bought a 35mm film SLR camera for a new hobby and started learning how cameras work – shutter speed, aperture, iso – what each of them control and how they work together to make interesting images. I’ve always loved cinema and visual storytelling but never had the opportunity or means to learn what underlies it all – photography.
I found a cheap 35mm film SLR camera on eBay, and purchased a few rolls of black and white film. I wandered the local streets taking snaps of what I thought was interesting and recording my settings along the way so that, when I got the photos back, I could see where I went wrong (or, hopefully, right).
I haven’t yet had a roll of film developed but, about 30 days in to this experiment, I finished a book which meant, you guessed it, time to take photos of my artwork. Urgh.
But, something has changed. This time, the process went smoothly. Things are well-lit, in focus, and, well, pretty damn good. It took about half the time it normally takes for me to do this part of the process and the results are at least twice as good.
So now, as I write this, it all seems so obvious but it wasn’t at the time – if you don’t like something, it may just be because you don’t know enough about it. I experienced this, first hand, with taking photos of my artwork, but looking back on other aspects of my life, it’s always been the same; classical music, poetry, ballet and contemporary dance, even american sports; once you understand the rules (or, at the very least, the general concepts and context of the activity), the more able you are to appreciate it and, perhaps, even enjoy it.
I wonder if there’s anyone else out there for whom this may be true, or perhaps it’s something holding them back from trying something new. Maybe it’s not that we don’t like something, it’s just that we don’t understand it yet.