Norman Dodds
Bio
BioI was born and raised in the Scottish Borders and I’ve lived there for most of my life. It’s a gentle place with rolling hills, woodlands, rivers, lochs and wildlife in abundance. The pace of life is equally gentle and crowds and traffic lights are delightfully scarce!
For much of my adult life I was a primary school teacher and then headteacher, working in several Borders primary schools. I have also worked in many other areas including forestry, building sites, road works and puppeteering. Since I left primary education, I have dabbled in various forms of commercial photography and I also build websites – sometimes purely for fun and sometimes people give me money. It’s a good arrangement!
Links
About my photography
Photography has been a lifelong interest. As a 5 year old boy, I met my Spanish grandfather for the first time. He was a photographer and throughout my childhood years he and I would often walk together and he would take photos. I was fascinated by this unfamiliar world of cameras, light meters and tripods. I would spend many hours leaving sticky fingerprints on his slide and print collection! I still have 200 stereoscopic glass slides all taken by him in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
My first camera was bought at age 10 – a 5 shilling plastic camera from Woolworths! The prints it produced were 1 inch square! I have since graduated in many steps to a Canon EOS 5D Mk IV with a variety of lenses from 14mm to 400mm.
I’m a member of the Edinburgh Photography Meetup Group, the Kelso Photography Meetup Group and Kelso Camera Club.
I don’t have any particular specialism – I like photographing anything and everything. Ultra-wide angle is a particular favourite though. I also LOVE Lightroom and Photoshop. I like photos which are visually striking and which have content I find appealing.
I don’t have any high-powered motives for being a photographer. I just enjoy the whole business of taking photos and editing them. I also love learning and, with photography, there is no endpoint to what can be learned. Talking with other photographers (often in an establishment offering a variety of beverages!) and learning from them is very important to me.
The Photographers
Norman’s Recent Posts
Recently, I’ve become very aware that many photos obviously lacking sharpness are often posted both on social media sites and also on photographic sites such as Flickr….
Landscape photographers have often encountered a subject where there is a very high dynamic range. Typically, skies are too bright and shadows are too dark if you expose for the mid tones. One way to overcome this ….
Photography is all about light – by definition! How we ‘read’ the light in any scene or subject is one of the most important steps in taking a photograph.
So, you’ve found something you want to photograph. Do you just point and press or do you stop and think first? What goes on in a photographer’s mind between the time a possible shot is seen and when the button is pressed?
© Norman Dodds 2018