Seeing the World with a Photographer’s Eye

I don’t know the exact date, but I remember the day on which I started seeing the world differently. Some people have near-death experiences, others have a monumental epiphany.

For me, it was when I got my first SLR.

It was August or September in 2000, and after having no inspiration for a suitable university graduation present from my parents, I was watching a TV programme in which someone was using a "proper" 35mm camera with a big telephoto lens. I commented, “I’ve always wanted one of those proper cameras.” My dad spun his head towards me, clicked his finger and pointed at me, exclaiming, “That’s what we’ll get you!”

And so it began.

We wandered that afternoon through the high street of my hometown, Ayr in Scotland, to a now long-shut-down camera shop called Vennel Cameras and bought a Pentax MZ-50 with a 28-80mm lens. It was entry level, it was pretty basic, but it was my new SLR—and it is almost solely responsible for my obsession with camera kit now.

Being a man, I took a cursory glance at the user manual but somewhat arrogantly assumed I knew how it worked. It was a simple best, but I did make a fundamental mistake of not selecting the right mode (I wanted aperture priority but instead chose the ISO setting), something that would thankfully only have the effect of slightly underexposing the entire roll.

The first photo I took? A sheep in a field on the side of a hill (do you know what your first proper photo was?!)

What I quickly realised, however, was that I found myself framing the world, and I could see through my eyes differently: I was framing it in my mind. What I mean by that is that I was applying a virtual frame to everything I looked at. Instead of walking around aimlessly looking at the scenes in front of me, I was looking through a photographer's eye. And I was moving my head to find different angles that would translate well in silver nitrate terms on the 35mm film.

Even when I was walking around without my camera (something I now rarely do), I was framing and taking pictures in my mind’s eye, thinking about how I’d expose the shot.

It’s actually a very handy discipline I'd encourage you to try next time you're out and about: look at a scene and assess it for colour, light, contrast, foreground, background, movement and so on, before even lifting the camera.

And, probably most importantly, walk away if it doesn’t work for you: that section in the sun would blow the highlights entirely; this dark area will turn out almost black; that foreground is horrible and I can’t move it, etc.

I often watch other photographers and try to work out what their own photographer's eye is picking out in the scene. Some people just walk to a spot, put the camera to their eye, take the shot, then glance at the back of the body and move onto the next photo opportunity (many tourists are particularly bad at this—and people who have grown up in this fast-moving era).

Those of you who read my first article about slow photography will know that this kind of approach is all wrong for me and my way of photography.

I prefer to stand still and take in the scene in the first instance. The view in front of me isn't there for my camera; it's there for me to enjoy first and foremost.

I just stare at the vista without lifting the camera. If I'm with someone else, we may or may not talk about the view. I'll ask myself what the scene is telling me. What do I want to capture? What do I want to remember? What has no one else seen?

Then, if I'm using a camera without a built-in meter, I'll grab a light meter and take a reading from a few parts of the scene to get an average. Then the camera comes into play.

I lift it up to my eye and focus it. I move it around until I find the framing I want. Then I pull the trigger.

If it's an SLR, the sound of that shutter is so satisfying. I'm probably being weird, but I could walk around with NO film in the K1000 and take shots just to hear the shutter sound (once upon a time, my dad actually DID walk around without a film in the K1000, but that's another story for another time). It brings back so many good memories and confirms to me that a photo truly has been taken—all too many point and shoot digital cameras, including smartphones, lack that finality and reassurance that the image has been captured.

But even without all that pomp and ceremony, it's the photographer's eye that underpins the whole process.

Without that, I might as well take photos blindfolded.