It is a truth universally acknowledged that summer is the best time to try new things in photography. There is plenty of light, of course, but there is also plenty of opportunity, because on holiday you have more time on your hands, and there are exciting new places and experiences to inspire you. Summer holidays can also be a time of taking stock (and I don’t just mean stock photography), setting goals and exploring new options. This year, looking back at my summer pictures — encouraged by that Facebook feature that shows you posts from the same day in previous years — I realised that my path as a photographer can be charted by looking at what I was doing each summer since I caught the photography bug in 2009.

2009

For me, this is the picture where it all started. I took it on a beach in Turkey, where we spent our summer holiday, exploring the sites on the west coast visited by Alexander the Great, from Troy down to Bodrum. At the time we had a tiny Lumix point-and-shoot digital camera that slipped into a pocket. A typical day involved visiting some ruins and then finding a beach at sunset. Miles was running around on the sand, and I was taking pictures, playing with the shapes of shadows and silhouettes. This picture jumped out at me, even from the tiny screen of the Lumix. I was quite pleased with it. My husband said there was a new kind of digital camera that looked interesting — mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras had just appeared — so I bought one when we got home (an Olympus E-P1).

2010

This picture from the following summer shows what I was doing at the time: taking pictures with my Olympus and learning how to process them using presets in Lightroom. I was so obsessed that I even took my desktop Mac with me on holiday to the south of France! Looking back, I overdid the processing, but as far as I can tell the same was true in the old days with black and white printing — everybody used to burn things in ridiculously. Only by going too far do you learn how far is enough! By this time I was finding my way into various photography communities online, and making new friends, many of whom are still friends to this day.

2011

A year later I had decided to go in the opposite direction. I was processing things in a more low-key way, in monochrome or sepia. I had also started to buy different lenses, with wider apertures that allowed for shallow depth of field — and bokeh! That summer I also set myself a specific challenge: to learn how to use my husband’s old Rollei film camera. I had to get used to the square format and the left-to-right reversal of the viewfinder. Looking back, it was my first dabbling in film photography. This image was taken with the Olympus, but cropped and processed as though it was a Rollei picture. I think I was trying to work out which aspects of the photographic tradition I was most interested in.

2012

In the summer of 2012 I got deeply into film photography. I had bought a Contax 645, which is bigger and heavier than the Rollei, but much simpler to use, being a reflex camera. I’d also been on the “Film is Not Dead” course run by Jonathan Canlas, and embraced his approach to using Portra 400. I shot lots of medium-format pictures that summer, and also messed around with Impossible Project film in old Polaroid cameras. These pictures were taken on my birthday, when we spent the last weekend of the summer on the coast with friends and family.

2013

As you can see from this pair of images, my thing in 2013 was diptychs, and I did my first 365, posting a diptych a day. I really enjoyed being able to pair images to tell a tiny story, or contrast two views of the same thing, or show a detail juxtaposed with a wider view. Some of the diptychs, like this one, were taken with the Contax 645, but others were taken with digital cameras. The main thing I remember about this summer was that I managed to trash my Nikon D800 by getting water on it, when shooting in a river. Fortunately the insurance covered everything when we got home, but this mishap cast a cloud over my photographic adventures that summer. In hindsight, my digital camera being out of action pushed me even more towards film.

2014

So in 2014 I set myself another challenge: to do a 365 using only Tri-X film, shot mostly with my Contax Aria and a 50mm lens. During the year I also shot some medium-format Tri-X, and to complete the set I even borrowed a 5×4 camera from a friend and shot a few sheets of Tri-X in that, too! But it involved an amazing amount of messing around, from loading the slides in dark bags to processing the sheets in a tank. I love Tri-X, but I think I found my limit when it comes to photographic faffing; large-format cameras are just too much. Just to follow that thought to its logical conclusion, in summer 2014 my husband and I spent a weekend learning how to do tintype photography, which is even more complicated than large format. It was funny, because in some ways it’s very modern — you have to make the slide, shoot it and develop it within minutes, so it’s like instant photography. But you also realise how complicated photography used to be.

2015

Having gone as far as possible in the direction of complicated chemical photography in 2014, I went in the opposite direction in 2015. The iPhone 6 came out at the end of 2014, and in 2015 it established itself as my main camera — the camera is much better than on previous iPhones, and the pictures are good enough to sell to stock libraries. It’s also an ideal camera for taking overhead shots of tables, and I took lots of them in 2015, particularly in the summer when we could eat outdoors. This is my signature iPhone shot, I suppose, with variations from a family feast to a quiet Sunday morning coffee. Sometimes I even use a selfie-stick to lift the camera above the table.

2016

And what have I been up to this summer? This year it’s been all about reconciling camera photography with smartphone photography, to get the best of both worlds. My main digital camera now is my Sony A7 ii, with a 35mm lens, which I have now settled on as my favourite focal length. The Sony is small and light but takes brilliant pictures. It’s also mirrorless so it’s more like my iPhone in that I can see how my images will look immediately on the screen without faffing about. And it has Wi-Fi, so I can transfer images to my smartphone and process them there, if I want to. In many ways I prefer smartphone apps over desktop ones when it comes to processing images, and it means I don’t have to take a computer on holiday. At the same time I’ve been shooting another 365, this time in black and white on my Leica M6, with an f/2 35mm lens. These two small cameras, plus my iPhone, allow me to indulge my love of classic film photography while also taking advantage of the latest digital toys. It feels like my ideal photographic setup — for now, at least!

So what have I learned from all this? When that image of Miles on the beach from 2009 popped up in my Facebook feed, I realised many things have changed. I have explored all kinds of photographic techniques and equipment, I’ve developed my eye and I feel I’ve made a lot of progress. But I also look at that image and realise that some things have not changed at all. I still enjoy the thrill of photography, and the magical way it can capture the joy of the moment, something that first hit me on that summer evening seven years ago. (No seven-year itch for me!) I am still just as curious and excited by photography as ever, and I’m sure I’ll be setting myself new challenges and trying new things for many summers to come. I like to say I’m solar-powered: I take pictures all year round, but summer is when I feel most alive, as a human, and as a photographer.

kirstin