How I Want to Inspire the Use of New Photographic Techniques

My interest in photography started when I was working as a teen in an electronics store. I sold cameras and was curious about how they worked. I bought a camera and played with it. I read about f-numbers and depth of field. I read about shutter speeds and played around with long exposures. I read more and more (also bought more and more) and the curiosity stayed with me.

A study in photography at the art academy did nothing to quench my interest. It only helped me to discover even more about the medium and its workings. If anything, it showed me there was even more to discover, more questions to be asked. While other classmates got interested in fields like fashion photography and still life photography, I dove even deeper into the workings of photography.

I enjoyed experimental double and long exposures to express what a single image could not. My presentations were interactive, because I felt like it contributed to the experience. By combining my photography with programming I found ways to compress a time-lapse of a thousand images into one. Instead of choosing a photographic minor, I choose a minor that focused on new media and cross media storytelling, so to enrich my photography even more. In the end (to paraphrase Scott McCloud) I didn’t focus on saying something about life through photography, but I focused on saying something about photography itself with the goal to discover all that photography is capable of.

An image from my project Time Works that shows a self-developed technique to compress time in one image.

Photography is developing in ways that the original inventors could not have imagined. Storytellers have a whole new set of tools by combining photography with all the possibilities digital media have to offer. We can create images in virtual worlds. We have access to programmable electronics. Computational photography is a frontier where we use computers to enhance what we can do with photography. There is so much happening and so many things are possible that I wish more people would use these new tools and tell interesting stories with them.

PhotDev is my reaction to this.

On this website I will explore the world of photography and new photographic techniques for my own curiosity and pleasure but most of all to stimulate, inspire and show others what possibilities there are and how to use or develop them. I will be writing tutorials and articles on practical matters in a hands-on way but also discuss books, theories and interview photographers, programmers and other artists; anything to stimulate the development and usage of new photographic techniques. I would like this platform to be a community, both online and offline, to support all those who want to explore the newest possibilities of photography.

As this platform is a learning experience for both me and its other participants, I invite everybody to contribute in any way possible. In this process I am a teacher and a student, and can use all the help I can get. I am teaching myself, so I can teach others and we can learn together. I don’t believe I have all the answers, but I’ll do my very best to help you ask the right questions.

Thanks in advance for your support and joining me on this journey,

-Erik Kroes