Looking back at my younger years, I suppose I should’ve known that sooner or later, I was always going to end up with a camera in my hands, whether it was for personal or professional use.
I can remember the first time I started using a camera on a regular basis. It was around my Grade 9 year when I was either 14 or 15 years old, and my “gear” consisted of a square little film camera that belonged to my parents, and I was allowed to use it as often as I wished as long as I bought the film myself. With that knowledge in mind, I became something of a shutterbug at school, snapping photos of this, that and everything. I even brought the camera into an English test and took photos after I was finished. I think if I did some digging, I’d find a few shots of my fellow classmates writing furiously in Mr. Caslor’s class while my friends and I goofed off. (I can’t remember if I aced that test or not…)
As well, I was also starting to show signs of becoming something of a creative writer in those formative years; in particular, screenplays and short stories.
The written word and the visual medium were two things that I became connected to as a teenager, but I never really knew that I’d end up juggling both in my adult life.
I guess I would wind up using a camera for both personal *and* professional use after all.
The words, quotes and paragraphs of information that make up an interesting story in the pages of this newspaper or any other publication are crucially important – I mean, there’s no story at all without the words – but they’re not the only thing that help tell the story itself. A good photo adds to whatever is written on the page, but a great one can tell a story by itself; evoking all sorts of emotion and letting the viewer translate it however they see fit.
Photography has been an essential key in my line of work, and much like my line of work, it’s something in which you never stop learning, no matter how long you’ve been doing it.
I’m fortunate because taking photos is something that I truly enjoy doing, not just when I’m on the clock. Often, what we need to do as part of our professional lives can become something that we eventually come to dislike in our personal ones, but with me, that certainly isn’t the case with photography. I like to think I’m a pretty good one, although nowhere near some people who own some incredible camera gear and photo software. Still, I think I have a good eye for framing certain shots and getting just the right angles, especially with landscapes and sunset photos. We manage to live in a pretty photogenic part of the province out here in rural Saskatchewan, and I definitely like to take advantage of the slogan on our license plates, ‘Land of Living Skies’.
Like anyone else who dabbles in the visual arts, I have one particular piece of work that I’m pretty proud of.
Once Iconic: Readers of this fine publication, as well as any of my followers on social media, and even a number of people in Outlook who have framed prints of this photo hanging on a wall may know which image I’m talking about when I say the title. It’s a particularly vivid snapshot of the SkyTrail walking bridge in Outlook that I took in late August of 2016. I took it at sunset while I was down in the regional park on a Saturday night, and there was just something about the contrast between the sky full of colors and the dark, nearly blacked out bridge looming in the forefront. When I thought of what to title the photo, I just thought that the bridge was something that was once iconic, speaking to its nationwide popularity at one time and contrasting it with its current loneliness as something that has sat locked up and closed for over four years now.
In photography, you’re always learning how to tell these visual stories because no one subject is the same. I hope this is something that I continue to learn at, and I’m looking forward to telling many more visual stories for years to come.
Just what those stories are, I don’t know; I won’t know until something grabs my eye and compels me to just snap away.
Luckily, life around these parts is something that seems to be always waiting to tell a story.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
