People ask me how long I’ve been into photography and they are always surprised when I say I’ve really been doing it for less then three years. That’s not quite the whole story however.

I tried to recall my first experiences with photography when I was interviewed recently by friend and fellow photographer Tom Hole. I had an old manual SLR which I learned to use but never stuck with. I was visiting my parents for Christmas and I thought I’d try and see if I could find any of my old prints, and to my great surprise I manage to track down the exact photographs I referred to in the interview:

“I remember being obsessed with creating double exposures, making my friends look like ghosts, and trying to recreate scenes from top gun using model aircraft stuck to the inside of my bedroom window”.

…so here are two photos I took in 1993 when I was 11 years old:

Even at that age I was interested in creating the image from scratch rather than photographing the world around me. And now that I think about it everything I have done since has been preparing me for where I am now - my early experiments in photography were followed by years of working with computer arts packages. This all leads to the creation of composite images and complex work with strobes which are my main passion now, when I finally pick up a DSLR and reignite a dormant interest in photography.

MG

What do you do when it’s past midnight on a cold dark Christmas evening & there’s nothing on TV? Put on a 100mm 1:1 macro lens and look for something to point it at! For me the Christmas tree with all of it’s lights and decorations was an obvious target. This is the first time I’d been taking photos for the sheer fun of it in a long time. I was using a macro lens so that nothing would be too close or far away, giving me complete freedom - a principal which dictated my entire approach to the shoot.

If you don’t have a dedicated macro lens there are several options to getting close focus - extension tubes, screw on close up adaptors and finally reversing a telephoto lens.

Other than that you only need a tripod - camera shake is exacerbated by working close to your subject and the relatively dim output of the fairy lights is not going to get you anywhere near hand holding territory! I had the aperture wide open at f/2.8 and this obviously has the effect of reducing depth of field, but the main reason I was shooting wide open, however, was so that I could simply look through the viewfinder and see exactly what I was getting (without having to keep pressing DOF preview). Shoot into something hollow such as a Christmas tree and there will be detail at many of depths, selective focus allows you to pick out what you want and pretty much defines the shot.

I was simply moving the camera around, turning the focus ring and just seeing what looked interesting. The best thing about self assigned projects (or rather, messing around) is that there are no constraints and no penalty if it all goes wrong. It’s something I’m going to force myself to do more often from now on as it not only will it help brush up on technique but it’s good to relax and recharge creativity (you can tell we’re getting to that resolution making time of year again). That’s pretty much it except to say read on to see the results, and do give it a go yourself!

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I should say at the head that this post is not really about photography. But before I get a head of myself, it does head in a similar direction… Ok I’m done.

This is my contribution to The Head Project which, in case you didn’t know, is “a work of worldwide collaborative fiction”. Basically you get a head for two weeks, it is yours to do as you please with the only condition that you document your experiences, feed it and post it off to the next person when the two weeks are over.

So the box arrives in York, and for the first time I begin to get a sense of what the project is really about. The container itself, the outer protective shell of the head is clearly well travelled. There are many addresses scrawled over the cardboard with a return to: in Chicago and it arrives bearing documents from the Icelandic post office. Global indeed. I decided my contribution should coincide with where my own head is at…

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Ok this is the first (and by far the most important) link/piece of advice I can offer for aspiring photographers.

I’ve always hated the look of flash in photos; nuclear white deer in the headlamps subjects in front of an underexposed background. When I started to become serious about photography I did everything I could to make use of available light to take photos including investing in expensive wide aperture lenses and some dicey handheld long exposures. I was totally anti-flash.

I knew that studio photographers used big flash heads all the time but had dismissed this as the preserve of the rich[er than me]. This was until discovering David Hobby’s blog: strobist, which demonstrated what can be accomplished using an inexpensive battery powered flashgun and little bit of brainpower.

This lead me to the following realisation: photography is light. And if you are not doing everything in your power to bend light to your will then you are not realising the full creative potential of a given scene. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a suite of big mains-powered strobes, the key is to control the light by any means possible, whether it’s changing the colour or firing the flash remotely from an oblique angle or simply bouncing/modifying the onboard flash.

MG

Welcome to the online blog of photographer Matt Grum. Ok, writing that felt a little strange (also aren’t all blogs online?), anyway I shall dispense with the formalities and get right to the point!

I’m writing this blog for three reasons - firstly, to give people a better insight into what I do and to present a slightly friendlier, more personal face than my standard front page. Secondly, as a resource for other photographers with set-ups, tutorials, and links, and finally just to be something that people will find interesting, regardless of their particular area of expertise.

At least those are the goals - I’m relying on you let me know if I’ve got anywhere close! So drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you think.

MG