Photography is my serious hobby

It is Tuesday again and the #edublogsclub challenge prompt is out. This fourth prompt has a very special meaning for me, because photography is a very serious hobby for me. I spend many hours taking pictures, studying the work of great photographers and seeing tutorials in a number of recognized youtube channels. This is something I already integrated to my daily life that in fact I lately chose my smartphone based on the quality of its main camera, regardless of other features.

I started taking digital pictures many years ago with a 3 MP point-and-shoot camera, which I still use, mainly because I was curious about digital image production. Back in that time, DSLR cameras were way out of my league, I did not have any clue about shutter speed, f numbers or ISO values. Depth of field and Speedlight guide number were mysterious concepts to me. The point-and-shoot was in automatic mode, always. For the record, there is nothing wrong in using a camera, professional or hobbyist, in auto mode. Some recognized professional photographers use it, for instance to take a scratch picture of a scenery to be perfected latter. The deal is to progressively switch to semi-automatic modes and finally to full manual, there is a clear gain in control over picture quality and creativity possibilities.

 

Now, after this short intro to my post I’d like to come back to the topic of the prompt: including an image. For the remaining of this post, I’ll try to make a point how still images make a meaning.

As educators, we are supposed –among a thousand other things- to be professional communicators. At least to the extent of our subject’s field of knowledge. We spend a great deal of time developing printed/digital documents of various formats, even video and sound formats are expected. In my case, most of those documents include still images (photographs, clipart, diagrams, charts, etc.) I tend to use images for two reasons, one reason is “decorating” a rather boring document, the second one is presenting information otherwise difficult to express with text.

It is interesting to analyze the text to image ratio over a period of time, not so much surprisingly images have taken more space over time. In my opinion this is not always a disadvantage, as long as the imagery contributes to display concrete representations of the ideas being communicated. Text and images go together and the reader creates a compound understanding of the set. Readers do not rely only on the text they are reading, they capitalize on all the visuals, including the text that was treated as an image. Sometimes text and images are highly coupled, and it is impossible to take one away (text or image) without profoundly altering the original message.

Let me get back to one idea expressed above. Text can also be processed, in the sense of word processing, as a constitutive part of visual design. Consider for instance the following image.

Would you consider the content as text or image, or both? It is important to leave apart one technical aspect, the above is in fact an image (it was created and inserted as one image), that can be read as text. Do we understand sufficiently how text and images affect the process of delivering a certain message? I think the answer to this question is better provided by a semiologist.

PS: I regularly post my photographs in my Instagram account.