Back in the day I would buy AP (weekly) and PP (monthly), and devour the contents from cover to cover including all the adverts. I would look through all the great pictures from some excellent photographers and wish that I could achieve such excellence. I mean, how hard can it be, the accompanying article explained exactly how “you too can take shots like these” ? No matter how hard I tried I could not achieve the excellence of the standard being portrayed in the magazines so after a number of years I started to find magazines less and less attractive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I noticed that the names on the credits and articles seemed to become familiar after a while. It was obvious that these guys had the best of gear and were operating with budgets or owned businesses that allowed them the time and opportunities plus access to places the average amateur would never get near. I will always remember a piece in a magazine under a sort of “Try this at home” article that confirmed my suspicions. There was an amazing picture of a lady in a trailing ballgown standing staring out of a window that could only be in some stately home. The author of the article who I wont name said, “at this point I got one of my assistants to feather the lighting on the model.” I thought, whoa! Try this at home ? I don’t have a stately home, or a model, access to a stunning wardrobe or assistants to set up my lighting for me ! Alright, I could take a picture of my wife looking out of our front room window but I think I would be disappointed in the outcome compared to the magazine example.
Another thing about magazines that annoys me is that they are cyclical. Every spring there will be a “Spring shoots” article on photographing flowers, in the Autumn it will be “Capture the Autumn hues” soon followed by “How to shoot fireworks” then to close out the year “How to photograph snow”. It was becoming predictable and boring looking at similar articles in the magazines.
There came a point where instead of buying magazines out of habit, I would start to browse through them first and see if there was anything of interest in them. By that I mean was there any features on photographers shooting the same things as I was and did the article/images look interesting ? I was done with the “Try this at home” and “Try this technique” type articles and didn’t get anything inspirational out of instructional articles other than being demoralised and bored.
By this time on my photography journey I had come to the realisation that I was never going to produce show stopping landscapes or portraits to the standards that the now copious range of magazines were publishing. I would dabble in them and produce some nice photos but that’s about it. I had settled on what I liked doing and what I did best, Street and Documentary types of photography. I had also settled on my photography equipment so I no longer needed any of the equipment guides that seemed to be repeated every month. I would research the market online if and when I needed to get replacement kit and keep up to date with the online free subscription to Photography News.
