Taking Aim and Firing

Photography... something so beautiful, but with the potential to become so deadly. They were right to say that a photograph has the power of a thousand words and we all use it. We share the world we live, through photos posted on social media, and, thanks to image editing software, we often portray the photos we've taken in a totally different light to reality. This just fuels the need to be perfect in front of the camera, so that the world around us sees the perfection in the photo and that we have everything under control. However, often we're walking around broken and in need of help, yet are unable to get help due to having to break with the perfect image we have. This can be so dangerous. Sometimes I look at the world and all I see are phones that have been turned into cameras, that everyone uses to share their lives on. Many times I feel like we're living our lives online. Smartphones are turning everyone into amateur photographers and everyone shares all the details of their lives online. You could say it troubles me greatly, but I'm not writing this post to attack the world (and myself) in regards to our internet and social media usage.

Since the development of the smartphone with inbuilt camera, photography is now being used by every day people to document the good things that are happening to them, like a wedding or the birth of a baby. But everyday people also use photography to portray the bad that is happening around them, like the devastating effects of a natural disaster or war. So often, only a handful of these photos make it into the news, often due to the extremely graphic content within the photographs.

I grew up in Uganda, a country that has seen the effects of both a dictator and a civil war. I was born in the years after the civil war, during the period when Uganda had just begun to find her feet again. There were all night curfews (7pm-7am), and armed men (and often boys) at every checkpoint. My parents were fired up, and often would end up laying in the corridor of our home to do the bullets passing by our windows. Uganda is a very different country now. My parents have loads of photos from the 1990's when I was growing up, and if I showed you comparisons between the Uganda I was born into and the Uganda of today, you would be shocked. A photo says a lot more than words do.

I'm not sure how to apply this challenge I have for myself. I own a beautiful camera and I'm sad to say that I don't use as often as I would like to. My desire and in a way, a challenge for me, is to a point where I'm using my Panasonic Lumix G1 more than I'm using my smartphone's incredibly good quality camera. Over the last few years I've been part of an incredible online photography forum called Blipfoto. Where the aim is to post a photo a day, every day. Its basically a daily blog with a photo. I love it because of the freedom and the encouragement I've received on there. My photo quality has improved in leaps and bounds since I joined in January 2014 and my reliance on editing software has almost completely disappeared as my photos no longer need editing. Most of them are saved onto my laptop's hard drive, but one day I will print them and form photo albums of my life... like I've done with my journals over the years.