Photography, by Kevin

Photography is brilliant. Some people say that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. What photography is, is taking pictures using a camera. There are three types of camera: old cameras, new cameras, and spy cameras. There are also video cameras, but they are not used for taking pictures, they are used for making videos, so they do not count. They are not cameras in the sense that professionals or normal people use the term.

Old cameras are based on the use of mirrors and a shutter and photochromatic paper. They produce photographs in black and white of old men's faces. Very often the photographs produced using this old technology was blurred and of a low quality. This is because old cameras used a technology called SLR, which stands for Significant Lens Recoil. The longer the lens on an old-fashioned camera, the bigger the recoil, and the therefore the more likely that a shot will be blurred. The old cameras were very similar to guns in this respect, which is why photographers who used old cameras always talked about "photo shoots" and "taking shots." You will be pleased to know that old cameras are largely defunct now and only used by the elderly, by Luddites who are scared of computers, or by poor people who can't afford the new cameras. You can tell photos that have been taken with an old camera because 1) they are rubbish and 2) they look like they come from the olden days, before photography was invented. My dad still has an old camera in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, but he won't let me use it because, he says, it's too dangerous. Even he doesn't use it anymore for shooting things, but it has a ginormous lens that could take out a gnat's eye at 300 yards. If it was a gun. Instead, he just uses it as a telescope to watch the au pair next door hang out the washing. He thinks she is a secret agent for the Belgians, but I'm not to tell my mom because it will only scare her.

New cameras, also known as proper cameras, use the latest digital technology and have to be plugged into your computer to retrieve the images, which is how you know they are brilliant. They use the most cutting-edge technology to take pictures of amazingly high resolution and once you have them on your computer you can manipulate them using Photoshop. Once I put my sister's head on the body of a gorilla. It was very funny and everybody laughed. You couldn't see the join. When my friends saw it, they all asked for me to email copies to them. You can see it now on myfuglygirlfriend.com.

The other brilliant thing you can do with proper cameras is transfer all your photos onto a CD-ROM so that you can watch the pictures on your television set. If you have a big-screen TV, the photos can be bigger than real life. You can have a photo of your head, for instance, in which your head is bigger than your real head. Imagine that! Imagine if you had a head as big as your head on a poster. You'd fall down the stairs. And land on your head.

You do not have to put your photos onto a CD-ROM though. You can post it onto the Internet, for instance onto your blog or onto Flickr, so that everyone can see it and make sarcastic comments or link to it as examples of an inbred family or use up your bandwidth, the bastards. Also you can put them on a memory stick and put them into someone else's computer, or you can go to a photo shop or even the supermarket and put your memory card into the machine they have there and they will print your photos off so that you can have what is known as "hard copy," or what the people who used old cameras used to call "photos." These are the same images that you have on your computer, except on a special thick, glossy paper which does not smudge but loves fingerprints. There are hundreds of things you can do with a proper camera, in fact. You should go to Flickr and have a look at the things that people take pictures of. You'll be surprised by what people deem fit for public viewing.

The third type of camera is the spy camera. In some ways this is the best type of camera, although the image resolution is not normally as good as on a proper camera. This is because the spy camera is designed for circumstances that would usually be described as illegal, such as taking pictures of ladies' bottoms in the supermarket, which you cannot do very easily with a proper camera, because they are too large, and you cannot do with the camera on your mobile phone because they are deliberately designed to make a camera noise when you take a picture, so you would have to cough loudly at the same time, which often draws attention to what you are up to, which is exactly what you don't want. This is why mobile phone cameras are rubbish.

Spy cameras have a low resolution because they are designed to be inconspicuous, such as in the clip of a ballpoint pen or as an attachment to a keyring. I have one that is in the clip of a ballpoint pen, and also one as an attachment to a keyring. The ballpoint pen one is useful because you just place the pen in your breast pocket, and when you want to take a picture of something or someone, you just kneel down close to it, pretending to be doing up your shoelace, say, and then you press down the tip of the ballpoint pen half a dozen times while nobody is looking, pointing it in the right direction of course, and then you run home and lock the door and upload the pictures to your computer. If you are really daring, you can pretend you have dropped your pen on the floor very close to a lady who is wearing a dress, and then, when you bend down to pick it up you can press it several times while it is in the general area of looking up at her knickers. I have dozens of photographs like this except most of them are very dark and blurry and you have to use your imagination and they don't enhance very well no matter how many hours you spend of Photoshop and also your friends won't believe you when you tell them what it is and I can't go back and do it again because I'm banned from Waitrose now.

Anyway, I hope that you will take up photography now that I have shown you how brilliant it is.

And that is the end.



(Kevin MacPherson is an extracurricular field worker in the David Bailey School of voyeurism at the University of Keele ladies' changing rooms.)