Photos That Changed My Life: 2
August 29, 2007
I’m posting this even though it’s a bad photograph.
It’s a collection of “things” that were found inside the Ntarama Church, used by those folks that were massacred there in 1994.
I had only bought my first Digital SLR a few weeks prior to this trip to Rwanda in 2005. I played around in Abilene, getting used to using a manual camera again (I’d been using digital point-and-shoots since giving up my 35mm film camera after college), but was nowhere near competent. A fear of having ZERO usable images from that trip led me to shoot the majority of the photos with the noobie Green Rectangle (full Auto mode…meaning the camera makes most of the decisions for you, and essentially becomes a more expensive point and shoot). Perhaps it was the overwhelming experience of being in a church surrounded by skeletons, but all of the basic lessons I had learned from Mike James in Photography 101 a few years earlier just slipped my mind. I can’t recall a single moment spent looking for a strong diagonal, or a good C- or S-curve, or about lighting. I do remember trying not to step on any bones. This shot is fuzzy, poorly lit, and while it recalls, very vividly, a scene in my mind, I’m afraid it needs a little narration to mean anything to anyone else.
So, this photograph changed my life in that it is a constant reminder to me of my need to improve as a photographer. That’s not to say that a fire-from-the-hip snapshot with a point-and-shoot can’t be a powerful image, but to effectively communicate through an image, there needs to be a high level of technical proficiency (the ability to work with your equipment to produce sharp images), artistic appeal (good composition, framing, etc.) and the ability to tell a story through the objects you’re trying to show. I will always look at this photo (and others from the research trip of ‘05) with a certain regret, but also with a certain amount of resolve to always be improving my craft.
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