Sharing words – a visually impaired photographer
A while ago I was asked to share some words on being a visually impaired photographer. The odd thing about this little presentation was the crowd I had to speak to. They all had the same eye-condition as I am having; Achromatopsia! Every year there is a meeting of people with Achromatopsia and their relatives. I would guess there were 30/35 attending people or so. It was quit a crowd considering Achromatopsia is a rare eye-condition in Holland (… yes, that goes for the rest of the World too)
It was refreshing, peculiar maybe, to notice that there were no obvious reactions like I normally get. “Say what?”, “How is this possible?”, “Don’t you miss out on all of the action?” and “Aren’t you bored of not seeing those colors in the light-show?” Non of that.
My main pitches were: “You always get to stand in front of the crowd!”, “That big tele-objective gets the action closer to you!” and “Just use your camera to block-out the blinding lights out of your eyes!”. These things are actually very true. I consider these as great benefits. Especially (and I even forgot to mention this in my speech) the fact that I can always work directly in front of the stage, even in front of the crowd-banners, in the so called ‘photo-pit’ must be appealing to all people with such a bad sight.
We’ll see, my words might just have worked. Maybe someday, in the photo-pit, I’ll bump into another A-photographer!
Here’s a link to the facebook-event: Landelijke contactdag Achromatopsie 2016
