Guest Article: Essex Wedding, Portrait and Editorial Photography by Graham Jarvis

The following article is written by fellow photographer Graham Jarvis, please leave your comments below:

When a wise old photographer on a TV documentary I once saw said that there are just two variables in photography that decide what the image looks like; where to point the camera and when to press the shutter.

I guess most of the time, like you, I focus on where to point my camera. I tend to take photos of people so the choice is who to point my camera at and what environment they should be in when I point it at them. I spend an awful lot of time thinking about both of these things when planning a shoot. (Those who know me should get back up off the floor now; yes I do sometimes plan my shoots.) Who am I making images of or for? Should the camera be higher than my subjects, or lower? How close should I be to them? How much background do I want in the frame? Endless choices and questions. Landscape photographers, product photographers, hey, all kinds of photographers must go through the same cyclical thought processes with their subject matter.

When to press the shutter is not something I’ve given a lot of conscious thought to until more recently. Unconsciously though maybe I’ve been making decisions about when all of the time without being aware that I was making them. Photography has a lot of parallels with hunting (I’m sure I’m not the first person to think or say so). Psychologically we have retained the minds of our hunter/gatherer ancestors. Although where you look for your prey is important, knowing when to strike makes the difference between dinner and going hungry. Sometimes when is just a fleeting moment that will never happen again. Maybe we just instinctively pick the right moment in time? A brief glance at the photographs made by Henri Cartier-Bresson who regularly captured ‘the decisive moment’ will demonstrate that some people either have this ability in truck loads innately or they were able to sharpen their skills to an extraordinary degree by practice.

For those of us for whom photography is a passion and not a profession we are amators; the latin word for lovers. Lovers of the process of making images. Not necessarily the bumbling incompetent idiots that the word amateur now describes but certainly not reliant on our photographic hunting skills to put food on the table. At the same time neither are we blessed with an infinite amount of time to spend waiting for the perfect moment to press the shutter. The day job comes first so we can pay the bills. But despite the obvious time limitations there is still a whole universe of choice about when.

Seasons come and go. Winter not only strips the world of colour and back to it’s bare bones but the light is changed too. There are only a few hours of daylight and it’s quality is different because the sun is so low on the horizon. Shadows are long. Urban areas are artificially lit for longer. Summer brings with it vibrancy, colour, and vitality. Days are long then but sunrises and sunsets are at unsociable hours if you want to catch them at this time of year. The same scene is going to register a different quality dependent upon what time of year you shoot it. Think about your garden or local park and how many moods it goes through in a year.

There are weekly rhythms that may dictate when. I often shoot fashion and portraits in urban London. I don’t attempt that on a weekday. An early morning at the weekend can render a crowded thoroughfare an empty ghost town perfect for that shot you were planning with all your lights set up that would other wise be knocked over or ‘borrowed’ (though on the downside security do also find you a lot quicker on CCTV too).

The daily 24 hour cycle contains a spectrum of moods and opportunities. Day and night are completely different environments in their own right when it comes to making images. That big ball of flame moves around the sky pretty quickly when you desperately want the light to be coming from that particular direction that you need. Weather patterns can change within 24 hours to create unforeseen opportunities or to soak a meticulously planned outdoor shoot and ruin expensive equipment.

At the micro level most of our cameras are capable of capturing frozen slices of time of an eight thousandth of a second or even smaller. The concept is familiar to most of us but think about it; if your camera had an infinitely fast shutter movement and a phenomenally fast memory card of large capacity you could in theory capture eight thousand moments in chronological sequence in just one second. Which one of those moments would be the ‘best’ image for your purposes? (And you thought you had post-production editing and selection issues with the technology you have at the present…) You don’t have that camera yet but every second those 8000 potential images flicker by and you still have the opportunity to catch one or two and make them live forever.

Which one will it be?

Graham Jarvis is a Sony award winning photographer based in Chelmsford, Essex who shoots wedding, portrait and editorial images. When time allows. www.permanentdaylight.biz