Essentially, a camera is a light-tight box with a hole in the front, a shutter, and a recording medium within.
I grew up using 35mm film. Eventually, about 2000 - well before my Aberystwyth exhibition - I got a film scanner and my workflow became hybrid, where I would scan the developed film, adjust the image tonally using a computer, and send a digital file to print.
Currently, I’ve transitioned almost entirely to digital, all the way from image capture to print. Which is somewhat incidental to any core photographic purpose, even as it may impinge on the result ...
I love this Earth with its secrets, risks and wonders. My feeling is that as organic beings we're physically and emotionally wedded to it - being remarkably of it and meshed with its nature. But the universe is so thrillingly grand in its own right that it's hard to believe it needs the human race. Our Earth will surely perish or transmute, and so may we.
We're of the wilderness: it's a gift that we inhabit, interact with - and remain dwarfed by, despite the Anthropocene. What if there’s a great 'nothing' out there behind all that we can physically see and guess at - wouldn't that make our existence here, our consciousness of present and process, all the more magical?
Any notion that humanity may survive in the cosmos by developing the technology to do so, to me seems a grasping at immortality bedded in ambition and the physical realm alone. The impracticality of our species thriving on another planet far from home seems implausible to my naive mind.
Perhaps we can be (or are) eternal in ways that are un-physical and beyond our mental scope. Perhaps to grasp the fleeting moment is enough to serve for everything. Which if the instinct was healthy, the consciousness alert, would preclude much bad behaviour. We are flawed, though. But may we not have good intent and heart, and yield to the mystery?
Within it all as humans, we're able to access an inherent morality - curiously embedded in us. We can intuit its nature and truth, but also have free will and can choose to accord with or ignore it.
Being mortal, it seems, we are as leaves that fall into the compost heap, and the younger of us take human existence forward. I champion & grieve for them - what world is it that we bequeath? But it has always been thus in human life on earth, it seems, & we are only as atoms in the infinite. To see the stars & milky way, on a clear night away from streetlights, can chill the breath with wonder, maybe more so as a child ...
All this is part of the context of my humble noticings. I have no want to boast or shout. And what's it got to do with photography? Not a huge amount, but yet is the world not all one as we jostle in it, and is not everything significant?