So, this first post is apparently supposed to be about me. My name is Eve. I like taking photos.

As someone who is used to hiding behind the camera and communicating through images rather than words, this is a more challenging piece to write than I originally thought. The old adages “start from the beginning”, and “write what you know” are floating around my head, nudging me towards giving you either a full life history (yawn), or the shortest blog ever written respectively. But perhaps expression through words is not so different from photographs; there are still the key elements of subject, framework, and a need for illustration. With that in mind, I will try my best to explain myself and how I’ve grown with my camera – affectionately dubbed ‘My Other Limb’ – a little better than, “I like taking photos”.

Over the years, I have grown fond of the fact that I came to photography later in life. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to say, “Yes, I’ve always known I wanted to be a photographer”, but that wasn’t quite my path. Though I have been told that I had a camera in my hand from a very early age, my attempts at (and I use this term loosely) photography certainly weren’t creative, but were rather an effort to record the world around me simply because I could.

Throughout my teenage years, I continued this “can snap, will snap” approach using basic film cameras (including the oh-so-modern APS film system!), and eventually graduating to a digital point-and-shoot at the grand old age of 20. Having my first compact digital camera was when I started to really show my knack for shooting everything and anything around me; freed by the medium of infinite “film”, and going to university that same year gave me many new opportunities for photographic exploration. Whiteknights Lake on the Reading campus became a haven of nature walks, bird spotting, and season changes for me and My Other Limb. I gradually began to hunger for more variety for my shots, and for different, more flexible cameras.

It was still not until 2008 that I got my first digital SLR and, with this development, I also started the My Other Limb photography blog, which now – over three years later! – serves both as a portfolio and as a historical record of my progress as a photographer. Only after starting the blog did I feel it was permissible to label myself as “a photographer”, albeit one in training, and started to think and learn about how to take good photos, not just all the photos I could.

I realised that I had always seen the world through something of a lens, finding beauty in the mundane or intrigue in the ostensibly normal, and I would frame real world scenarios as though already photos on a mantelpiece. As a child, I sensed an emotional fluctuation as light changed, and felt like this kind of atmosphere, or the feeling of being in a place, might be captured by film. Perhaps these feelings could be conjured by an interpretive, sensitive photographer, to inspire the same feeling in a viewer of the photo without having to travel to the location itself.

As an adult, I have always loved candid shots of people interacting, interpreting relationships through distance and poise. Seeing the world in stills, and wanting to record it, was and is second nature to me. Perhaps my acceptance of my “late” start to photography is not just because I feel I came to it professionally at the right time, but also because I’ve always felt like a photographer, like it is part of me.

Initially, my natural instinct to capture my surroundings, or to find surroundings to capture, never seemed to warrant further analysis or some kind of official statement of intent. On reflection, though, that really is what my photography is about: recording the world around me. Not very much has changed in terms of how important it is to me to get that photo, or even just a photo, and it doesn’t get any more complex than that. I am inevitably attached to a camera of some kind during my waking hours. I will just as happily shoot an abstract idea as an event with real live people. Everything can be photographed, and I take joy from it all.

One thing I don’t enjoy is presenting my photos as already interpreted even if the image did have some kind of purpose for or meaning to me. This is why the majority of my published images are titled merely with song lyrics or poetry snippets, distancing my own personal reasons for taking the photo. This is also the most likely cause why I am uncomfortable writing a 1000 word piece about why I think I take a good photo.

So, maybe my initial thoughts about this post were right. Introducing and explaining myself is a complicated (and rather daunting) task; there are all sorts of things that I might tell you about me, my background, and my lifelong love of photography. I also know that I could wax lyrical about how I am really looking forward to exploring and presenting photography through words on this blog, and how excited and lucky I feel to have the opportunity to share my passion with others in this way. But for now, let’s keep it simple. My name is Eve. I like taking photos.

About the author

Eve Lloyd: Photographer in Charlotte, NC. Freelancing at My Other Limb since 2008, shooting everything from portraits, events, and landscapes, to products, animals, objects, and abstract images.