The start of a beautiful journey

It’s been a while since I decided to put my thoughts into something more productive. Not just leave them as thoughts vanishing away like it appeared. For quite some time, I’ve been thinking of doing something worthwhile with my love for photography. At this point of time, I am not practicing photography professionally but the love and passion I have for it is worth exploring every day.  Seeing the number of photographers mushrooming out from every corner sometimes can be disheartening for many especially the professional ones who are struggling however, it is okay to pursue what you genuinely love doing. So here I am doing what I love and using the gift God has blessed me with.

Let me start with how I really got into photography. As a child I was fascinated with beautiful photos and loved using my dad’s point and shoot camera, however, never really thought I would fall in love with it given an opportunity. Thankfully, during my undergraduate studies, Photography and Photo Journalism were one of my main papers and slowly I started loving what a camera could do in the hands of someone who really has the passion for it. I am so thankful; I got to learn photography before digital cameras became a boom.  The first Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera I got to use was a Minolta camera that was passed down from my dad to my elder sister and then to me. It was so much fun.

The first ever roll film that my group in college shot with an SLR camera was ruined; apparently we overexposed all our shots. But that was such a great learning experience.  Since then we have had good and bad days but the love for photography remains. And my very own SLR camera that I bought was a Nikon FM 10. I still have it though I hardly use it now but I treasure it a lot. Well, I’ve moved on to digital era but I feel privileged to have been able to start off my photography with manual cameras. It’s such a totally different experience. You have to trust what you have captured and wait till you develop it to see whether you make the right choice. The fun of capturing and awaiting for the result was so thrilling. And yes of course moving to digital world has its own share of fun and advantages. You don’t have to worry about your film getting over; you can take as much as you can (though that can restrict your creativity, nevertheless) and it’s so fun that you can instantly see the result and process it from your laptop without having to go through the ordeal of getting it developed and printed. You can do all your post processing with your ‘digital darkroom’ (I love that term and am going to use it. I read about it somewhere but don’t remember where, a term used for Photoshop, Lightroom etc or any photo editing software). And well, that’s my story of how I grew to love photography.  

In the last one and half years I’ve been able to travel to places that I never dreamt or imagined (well, thanks to hubby) and I’ve been taking photos of all these places.  So I decided to put them up on my blog with my stories and experiences of the places I visit or visited. Well, it is going to take time for me to organize and write about them but slowly and steadily I will. I just have to be patient with myself. I want to keep the memories alive and fresh. To start off my journey, I will share photos that I had taken as my undergraduate final photography project. These photos are all taken with SLR cameras, developed and converted to digital medium and I am really proud of these photos. Though amateur it was my work I carried out for three years as an undergraduate student and they are so dear to me. And, next week watch out for my next travel photo blog.