In the latter stages of my working life the phrase regularly in my vocabulary was “an assumed level of knowledge”. My role was as a senior operations manager for a long established major book publisher. In short when things went wrong it landed on my desk to resolve and retrospectively analyse the cause to establish if anything could be learnt from it. A high percentage of times it struck me that there was an assumption along the way that the recipient of a given communication had an equivalent level, at least, of knowledge and understanding as the communicator.
Recently I purchased an Epson V500 scanner to scan medium format images from the negatives from my newly purchased Holga camera. To be truthful I had a devils own job to scan the negative as a square format. “Why not read the handbook? “- I hear you ask. Goodness knows how much time I spent trawling through the accompanying CD darting from one drop down menu to the next and so on. There is so much information available in these instructions and I was left with a sense if you don’t a basic understanding of how the options work and reset after each scan you are struggling. To illustrate this turn up a recipe for scrambled eggs and check if it tells you to crack the eggs to remove them their shells. It is fair to say the writer assumed a level of knowledge.
My thanks go to Doug Chinnery, a pro photographer see http://www.dougchinnery.com , who e mailed a set of straight forward instructions to sort me out. If you want a good photography teacher I can thoroughly recommend Doug’s workshops and 1 to 1 options.
This week I became aware of US photographer called William Neil through Great British Landscape online magazine. In particular I was drawn to his impressionistic work. Lo and behold there was an E book available just on this work. It was a low price only available via him rather any of the other E book platforms. Well it must be straight forward I thought to myself and purchased it. The download link was e mailed to me. Attempted to download on to the I Pad without success. Further attempts on the desktop also proved fruitless. It transpired that it was a zip file, which to be honest I have been confident with in terms of dealing with it, and after a round of e mails with the photographer I finally synced it to the I Pad. Interestingly it can only be read as two files. One as the text and the other as the images, not my previous experience of buying and reading E books, hence the low price I guess. William Neill was rather indignant in his e mails with claims he had never had a customer having my difficulties. In essence there was a sense that I had learning difficulties- maybe I have. Once again there was an assumed level of knowledge and it would have been simple to include download guidelines.
Now fast approaching my mid 60s the pace of technological change continues unabated and there is a fear that my expereinces over the past couple of weekswill make me back off trying something new. During the working life my lack of working knowledge was circumvented by the fact the was usually someone to turn to for answers. That is not the case now.
The phrase assumed level of knowledge can be applied to photography as well. The early stages of my journey were not easy because of the language of f stops, ISO, histograms etc. I found my way through by extablishing a network of contacts I could turn to and not feel an idiot doing so. Next week I am attending a workshop at my local Apple store to be taught the options available when using an I Pad 2. Can’t that option being available via Comet, Currys and Amazon !
To close this post I have included an image made with a Hipstamatic app on an I Pad 2. it was shot using Kaimal Mark ll lens with Ina’s 1969 film type.
Photograhic Journey 