Training your eye as a photographer can lead to more than you expect. Let me explain… When I was young, I was constantly frustrated that even though I wanted to express myself artistically, I thought of my drawing and painting skills as rubbish. I wanted to create images but couldn’t get what I had in my head onto the page.
Some History
Fortunately, my dad introduced me to photography. He bought me a Minolta X-7000 and would pass on his copies of Practical Photography and other magazines he read.
I failed my art GCSE at school, only achieving a well-deserved E and never bothered with drawing or painting again. If my school had allowed photography as an option, my college options might have been different. But it took me another 16 years before I decided to study photography properly.
In 2012 I decided to move away from teaching martial arts and retrain as a photographer. There is an argument that you don’t need a degree to work as a photographer, and I mostly agree. I wanted to study at university more to prove to myself that I could succeed with education and to show my son that even though you struggle at school, you can achieve academically if you work for it.
Further Studies
University progressed well (First class Honours Degree followed by a Masters’s Degree, thank you), and sometime during my studies, my wife took up drawing. I spent a lot of time looking at the work of other photographers and my own. The process of analyzing work trained my eye to take better pictures.
This inspired me to have another go at art myself, and, much to my surprise; I found it relatively easy. No claims of greatness. I’m not the next Picasso (I love his work), but a striking improvement to what I used to be able to do. What changed it all was my degree. Analysing photos, creating my own works, and looking at composition and lighting must have changed how I see the world and trained my eye without me realising it.
I decided that I wanted to investigate oil painting. It was totally new to me, so I picked the brains of my friend and fantastic artist Natalie Williamson, watched some tutorials on Youtube and went online shopping.
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