Photographs

Q: Do you take many photos? A: Far too many, probably, in the way that most people with a smartphone do now. Most of them are completely disposable — a screenshot, a menu I want to remember, that sort of thing — and only a small fraction are actually photos I'd call meaningful. I do occasionally go through and delete the clutter, though I'm not disciplined enough to do it often. Q: What do you usually photograph? A: Mostly people rather than places, if I have the choice — friends doing something ordinary tends to mean more to me later than a nice view does. I'll also photograph food more than I'd like to admit, and the occasional bit of odd signage or architecture that catches my eye when I'm out walking. Q: Do you print any of them? A: Almost never, which is a bit of a shame when I think about it. Everything lives on my phone or in the cloud, so there's something slightly intangible about the whole collection — thousands of photos that I could genuinely lose access to overnight. I did make a printed photo book once, a few years back, and it's still one of the nicest things I own. Q: Are you good at taking photos? A: Reasonably, though it's more about instinct than technical skill — I understand roughly what makes a shot interesting, framing and light and so on, but I've never learned the technical side properly. My photos are decent for a phone camera; hand me an actual camera with manual settings and I'd be lost within about thirty seconds.