Something about me taking pictures...

Even though I took my first picture with my parents simple camera 30 years ago and got an SLR when I was 14 or so, I'm a pure amateur. The SLR was a Minolta camera with auto focus and anything else also automatic, and all the years I never switched the automatic off. That was pretty easy to get some snapshots on holidays, family parties and so on. Nothing really serious. That wasn't caused by an lack of interest in photography, but I'm not a very patient person... Taking pictures with different apertures and time, and then waiting days for the pictures is nothing that suits me. So there was no development and only a very poor output.

But something changed 7 years ago. With two friends, both passionated photographers, I went to Brazil. In ten days I took almost 400 pictures and the output was at least partly rather encouraging. First time I started to think a little bit more, when I took a picture. But still photography was only triggered by special events, in between nothing.

The next step was a short trip 2004 to Japan. There I bought a small Casio compact camera. And that was the right thing for me. I could take pictures, look what happened, i it okay or not. Trying something else, playing around with different settings and one could have it always in the bag to take a picture. So I and my girlfriend, she was affected by this little tool, too, went trough Berlin or somewhere else and took hundreds of pictures :)

The same year October we moved to Japan and then really increased a lot. In two years in Japan we took more than 20000 pictures, I think. Crazy, but true :)

And while taking all this pictures I started to see the limitations of the little Casio thing and noticed what it mean to have a SLR. The quality of my Minolta camera was much better. Just go to my flickr account, make a tag search for Casio and minolta and you'll see the difference. 

So what to do? being aware of limitations, starting to be a little bit ambiguous, and on the other hand still not satisfied with the analog work flow... I needed a DSLR! That's the solution, but such things are expensive. So I had to wait until my birthday last year when I presented me myself a Nikon DSLR. Know I could do what I wanted to do, but still not having learned how to do it...

A few months before my birthday I was looking for a solution to present our pictures from Japan on the our homepage. I was looking for some photo service having an API which I can use to present my pictures in a way I liked, while storing and organizing them somewhere else. And so I found flickr...

And sooner or later you will not only store pictures there, you started to look around, people are giving comments, choosing you as contact. So you see what is possible, and you're encouraged to try it out. It's fascinating: Colorful pictures, b&w, sepia, portraits and landscapes, macros, still life and action shots, all the variety of pictures I saw and started to try it while learning by doing. I bought some books and journals, looked around in the internet and so I learned a lot, but still I didn't how to do some pictures, but maybe I'll learn this some day, too, but it's a long way to go...

Meanwhile I quite satisfied with my current output. I think my photostream is really versatile, and very different people are enjoying my pics. But that's me, to specialize on one thing is nothing that suits me, always doing macro would certainly improve my skills on that, but I would stop it soon while being bored... So I'm trying everything, not perfect, but it's okay, at least for me. 

So I 'll go on, on flickr and here, showing my pictures, looking  what people  are thinking about them and learning...