I realised I never really talked about my interest in photography before. To be honest, there really wasn't one specific moment when I suddenly figure out I love taking photos. Thinking back, it really started back when I was in my early/mid-teens and my family went on holiday to Bali one year, and then Europe a year or so later. That was when my love for travel started. Well, not quite, my love for travel have always been there, it just got more intense after those trips.
I didn't really have a camera back then, my father was the one with the equipment and I remember feeling a sense of frustration when I see certain moments I wanted to capture, but wasn't able to do so. Then I moved to Australia for university and brought a small little Nikon film camera with me that was passed down to me when dad upgraded his camera. I took that with me when we went on trips and snapped so many photos that it almost cost me an arm and a leg to get the films processed. Then I 'inherited' yet another Nikon film camera from dad a few years later when he upgraded to a rather expensive digital camera. I can't remember the model/make, but it was a semi-SLR with those "intelligent" film process where you can swap out film rolls in between shoots. We went to China that year. I still had a role of film with me, so I took the small old Nikon with me.
In the next few years, during uni breaks, I would just go into the city with the "new" camera and just take photos of anything that caught my attention. Some photographers come up with a theme, an idea and then they go out looking for objects/buildings/scenes/people etc that fit that idea. I don't. I just go out there and see what happens. At one point, I bought a bright green $20 point & shoot camera with manual film winding mechanism from the post office just to experiment with a fixed lens with no zoom. I even loaded B&W film in it. I don't even want to remember how much I spent on developing films. It was an insane amount of my allowance.
I bought my own digital camera a few months after I graduated and started working. It was an Olympus C-730. 3MP with 10x zoom. Back then it was the smallest camera with a 10x zoom. Armed with a memory card instead of film, I was now free to really experiment. Some of the shots I took with this little thing is up on this blog, see the August 2007 posts.
2007, the year when I finally saved up enough that I decided I'm going off on a proper holiday. Of course, this meant I needed a new camera as well. After much research and testing, I got an Olympus E-510. Not a choice most people would make since Canon and Nikon seemed to be more popular with the masses, but I've never been one to go with the masses. Compared the the Canon and Nikon models within the same price range at that time, the Olympus was smaller, MUCH lighter, had an in-body anti-shake function (instead of having them in the lens), and a build-in anti dust system. Most importantly, it was small enough for me to hold in my hands without feeling like I was going to drop it. I have small hands, and every time I pick up a Canon or Nikon camera in the shop, I could barely get my fingers around their chunky grip and my hold on them never really felt secure. Didn't help that they all weigh at least 300g more than the Olympus.
Anyway, enough about the camera... the trip was fantastic. And I only wished that I had a better understanding of what I was doing with my camera back then before I went off. Either way, there were some good shots from the trip which I've put up here.
Travel and photography seem to go hand in hand for me; all the new things to see, to explore. For me, photography is about capturing a moment that caught my attention. It's about looking at the mundane and seeing a small aspect of it that could make it interesting, could be just the way the light fell on it, or just a slight tilt in angle that make it different (which is why you'll see some of my shots are slightly tilted). It's about seeing the world in a different way, recording the moment for myself (the reason why I take so many photos on my trips!), and sharing it.
