I’ve been asked by a corporate client to do a little workshop on small cameras.  A number of employees have been given Canon G11s to produce  photos and videos of events for their intranet and I’m supposed to give some rudimentary instruction and pointers as to how to coax the best quality out of the camera. The “students” will have varying levels of photographic skill (and motivation, I suspect). We’re not looking to turn them into professional photographers, rather improve some basic skills.

Actually, I’m looking forward to this, not least because I’ll be able to go to work without a huge camera bag on my shoulder. Also because there’s nothing like  teaching to make you put your own ideas in order…

Some of what I’ll say to them is in previous posts here (Thoughts on small cameras #1 and #2). This post is a little of the rest…

Yesterday evening I bumped into a neighbor who is also a photographer. We got to chatting and he told me how he finds it more and more difficult to photograph people these days. Wherever he goes, as soon as he gets out his camera, he’s faced with either hostility or demands for money. Now, although I have experienced both and agree that working in public is getting more and more difficult, I haven’t got to the point where it’s become an insurmoutable obstacle.

That said,  I find myself more and more at ease using compact cameras, simply because I get left in peace and the quality you can get from them these days is quite extraordinary.  Take the picture above: I visited the recent Christian Boltanski exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris with no intention of taking pictures but had my Canon G11 in my bag, saw this, made a picture and then a 76 x 114 cms Laserlab print of it which looks absolutely stunning. Yes, 76 x 114 cms (paper size) at 305 dpi.

I made the print to take it (along with some others) to my class.  I want to show what is possible with even a compact camera. If I have time I’ll even add some prints from my iPhone. The idea being that the camera they have is going to limit their output far less than their understanding of what they might do with it. I’ve never had a camera that limited me more than my own lack of ability.

Giving the class some thought, I realized that I didn’t want to dwell on technique. Of course there will be some of that but what of use can you really teach  beginners in a few hours?

I’m going to start with the idea that photography isn’t, in the end, about cameras or technique: it’s about ideas. I’m going to explain that no amount of shooting pîctures can replace having a clear idea of why you are making a photograph and what notion or emotion (or both) you want to convey with it. If you are – as they will be – making images to provide an account of an event, you need to ask yourself what exactly it is you are trying to tell with your photographs and then make sure that they contain that information.

Example: a man talking to an audience. Photograph the man or the audience alone and you haven’t made an account of the event at all.  You might know the two images  are elements of the same event but neither are adequate illustrations of it.  You would need to link them with text and my theory is that in many ways,  the weaker the picture, the longer the caption. Seems obvious to you? Great, skip this and go take some pictures…. But having seen some of the work of the people I will be teaching it’s clear to me that, beyond any technical limitations, the real weakness of their pictures is simply that they do not fulfill their intended function.

I think it’s important to understand the difference between a “souvenir” photo which has to contain just enough information to act as a reminder of a moment for those who participated in it and a photograph that functions as an adequate illustration and evocation of that event for a viewer who wasn’t there.  As a professional photographer I work on the basis that my audience isn’t those who already know and are interested in my subject. They are already won over. My audience should be those who are ignorant and don’t care. It’s their attention I need to try to capture.

If, in the space of a few hours, I can get my students to (begin to) make pictures that contain what they need to contain to fulfill their purpose as tools for communicating ideas, then I will have achieved something useful. Then we can begin to talk about technique.