ON Monday night Hugh Leonard will open, Photo 96, the exhibition of the Dublin Camera Club, and then for the next two weeks those of us who wish we could take better pictures will go in and out of the Irish Life Exhibition Centre looking at the prizewinners' work and wondering how they did it. Get movement into an action picture get light and shade into a building at noon in the Mediterranean heat get the right gap toothed smile from a child, the look of fierce concentration from an animal.
It's part of an on going dream for a lot of us to capture forever something that was only there for a second, to make the obvious and the diched picture seem fresh, to find the right doorway to frame something, to see that clouds in a big, angry cluster make a place look a thousand times more interesting than glaring sunshine.
I speak rather bitterly as I look at the albums of my over documented life and see an almost entirely black print with the caption Unsuccessful Picture of an Elephant, February 1996.
I remember the incident very well. It was as if the jeep was parked in front of Clerys and the elephant came out the door, his head as high up as the first floor.
Why did that picture not come out as anything but a blur? I actually thought, when I was taking it, that I would have trouble convincing people that it was all my own work. Sadly when the blur appeared it was only too easy to convince them. That, and a series of headless people enjoying a convivial evening, but recorded only around their midriffs, clutching their drinks, happy faces lost forever.
I took 12 pictures at a christening and was so ashamed that nothing that might be identified as the baby appeared in any of them, that I had to lie and say I had let light into the camera.
Never did I see the need to write down the dates or the names of people under any picture, believing that I would remember them and that only pathetic people identified the characters who paraded through their albums.
This is not so. I have no idea who a lot people are, even though they seem to have part of an intimate circle at one time, and I for a fact that hidden in a scarlet faced peeling crowd of holidaymakers, photographed at a Greek villa, is the present British Home Secretary. Had the snap been better and the names been written" underneath at the time, we could have produced a witty little bit of nostalgia.
So why, then, have I never taken lessons, gone on a course, joined a camera club? If taking good pictures is a skill that can be learned, why not 5p bellyaching and learn it?
I think it's got to do with approaching it in two, ways. I don't know whether the problems are technical or artistic whether it is all a matter of a wobbly hand, a feeble eye, a hopeless sense of direction. Or is it having no soul to recognise something beautiful or funny or stark?
Of course I'd prefer, really, to think it was just technical malfunction, and that underneath all this wrong focusing and hopeless judgment of light I have fantastic spiritual insight. But suppose this were not the case and you could learn every trick of the trade and still produce wooden pictures?
The people in the Dublin Camera Club say is not the way to look at it. You go to meetings, you listen to visiting speakers, you get technical advice, there are classes, there are competitions, there is a social life they often end the evening in a pub near their premises. And most important of all, there is the annual exhibition. You work all year to have something chosen to put on show. They assure me there would be fewer invisible elephants and headless friends if I was working towards a goal.
I have been watching people taking pictures recently. A couple with hugely expensive looking gear were making a big production about photographing Trinity College at sunset. There was something taped on the back of each camera. I asked what it was and found that on his were the words "Remove Lens Cap". It seemed a bit basic, even to a Mixed Infant like myself.
But he said seriously that you have no idea how easy it is to do. Twice in his life he had shot a whole roll of film that had come out blank and he had to accept that the lens cap must have been on. One of these times had been at the Taj Mahal, he said, and I thought he was going to cry so I moved speedily to the woman's camera. Her little notice in dynotape read "Tie back your hair."
Oh, the number of times she had ruined pictures by having a great strand waving in front of her lens. I wondered whether she should cut her hair but she said no, this would be going too far, photography was a hobby but it was not her life. Her life involved having long hair.
She looked at me slightly resentfully as if I should have realised this. I tried to look as if I did, but I didn't. It wasn't shampoo advertisement hair, it was long, lank hair and she was 50.
How could her hair have been her life'? People become more difficult to understand all the time.
Especially when they are using abbreviations. I tried to talk photography to someone, who is in fact an amateur but it was all about which SLR you use. It means Single Lens Reflex, by the way. And then there was a burst of TTL metering, which means Through The Lens metering. This is the kind of person who always drops to one knee when taking a picture.
I asked a real photographer why people did that and if they got better results. The real photographer said that he thought it was because people had seen it done in movies and they thought it was part of the ritual. He himself never did it unless he was photographing something that was on the ground, or it was an angle to get a news picture of someone who was coming down a stairs.
If he had to give anyone a hint it would be the old chestnut about taking a picture of a person in front of a famous monument.
He has seen it over and over. The person taking the snap keeps saying "I can't get you and the Eiffel Tower in the frame. Why don't you go back a bit?" And it still doesn't work so the photographer goes back a bit and my friend knows it's going to end up as a picture of the Eiffel Tower looking the way it always does and the friend a pin point in the distance, and everyone is going to be let down. What he should have done was position the Eiffel Tower where he could see it and then put the friend in the foreground.
It sounded very reasonable so I wrote it down. He said I should relax about it all and maybe join the club. It's only £50 a year and, as well as the lectures, you get the use of the dark room and studios and they meet on Tuesday nights at 8 o'clock.
I don't know I really don't. There are so many things I should be signing on for, like car maintenance, surfing the Internet, framing your own pictures, bridge, calligraphy, assertiveness training. Would joining a camera club be just a luxury, a little indulgence?
Never say never. You only regret the things you didn't do, not the ones you did. Look back at those albums of out of focus trunks of people. Go to the Photo 96 Exhibition. Maybe, after all, it would not be an indulgence but a necessity to join the Dublin Camera Club. 10 Lower Camden Street, Dublin 2.