Blog Post One
As I am writing this, I would have just set up my website a few hours ago. It is 11:50 pm where I am typing this - in the United Kingdom, and safe to say I have come a long way from when I started. Before anything I would like to thank everyone who has believed in my process and journey - I would not have ever come this far without them. Thank you. You know who you are.
I have never written a blog before. I guess it is just writing down your thoughts on whatever you are thinking or doing? Not sure. I started photography actually when I was very young. I was three and my father had given me his old Leica M11 I cannot remember. It was in Thailand and me and my family were in a sort of beach-seaside resort. I still remember holding that metallic, silver body in my hands. I always loved handling and using sophisticated pieces of equipment - especially with heft and quality to it. Those type of things always had a calling for me. I remember going around the resort and just taking photos of whatever I saw. Back then, I thought I did a pretty splendid job, but now looking back at it I think every single photo I took was completely out of focus (keep in mind that old M11 was a manually operated camera with a mechanical summicron lens) for the age of three - pretty impressive. Anyways I carried on completing other side quests and hobbies in the years that I grew up - photography never really sparked in those liminal years when I was approaching my teens. At around the summer period during one of my school holidays when I was 16, I randomly decided to pick up photography again. Ill try to do my best to describe how and why I wanted to start again.
A few months to a year before that, my Father decided to buy me my very own DSLR. It was a pretty basic option - the Canon EOS 850D. It came with an 18-55mm kit lens. I was awe struck when I first received the box and opened it up to reveal the camera inside. My very own. It had pretty basic specs - 12 MP APS-C sensor, 1080p video and that was basically it. Nevertheless, it was my first camera that was mine to use. I just went around shooting furniture in my home, my dog Luna, my family members, and some shots of the landscape I shot out of my bedroom window. It was pretty basic stuff at the time, never heard of color grading or lightroom back then, just pure, unfiltered JPGs straight out of the camera, that I would view in the camera screen (I didn’t have a laptop at the time or I didn’t know how to connect the microSD card to it) so I just looked through that screen. I was pretty proud of myself, thinking I got all the right angles and lighting. I always loved the bokeh and depth of field cameras have, it just feels so realistic and high quality - like our human eyes for example.
My photography really started to thrive during the summer of 2024. I had just completed my GCSEs, the most official set of examinations I had in my life, and for the first time ever, I had nothing much I needed to do academic-wise, so I really pushed hard in my hobbies, with photography especially. My father had also bought me a canon L-series 70-200 f2.8 which was very impressive for me back then. A huge, heavy white lens that zoomed in a lot? That was cool to me. At the start of the summer my friend, Lev, visited Singapore for 10 days to hang out with me. That was my opportunity to bring my camera out and capture the beauty of Singapore for the first time in my life. We visited the Gardens by the Bay, Marina East Breakwater and Marina Bay Sands which were top highlights for our Singapore trip. By then, I felt quite comfortable using my DSLR as I had understood the controls and functions of the camera; I also had started to learn a little bit of Adobe Lightroom to make my images look better. The trip went amazing and I left taken some of the best pictures I’ve ever taken in my life back then.
Canon EOS 850D
Canon L-series 70-200 F2.8
I had also felt like my post-production color editing game has improved, as I could find the nuances in light and really play with the controls and dials to make my images pop. That trip really turned the tide for me as a photographer, as I was finally given a solid opportunity to truly push myself as a photographer and creative. It was also the time I decided to create my own photography page on Instagram. Lev encouraged me to create it and he was my very first and #1 supporter. Thanks man. We chose Instagram because we felt it was easy to just create an account and start posting. Never in my life back then would I ever predict I would be making full-length movies on Youtube too. I just took the work I had made during the trip and used that as a basis to start posting regularly. I also tried to reach out to a lot of large photographers and creatives on Instagram - some actually replied and showed their support to me and I appreciate those people a lot. I guess as a hobby photography just really speaks out to me as it really pushes people to capture beauty in the most unforeseen places and circumstances. I guess my journey as a creative truly started the moment I was born and I have just been honing my skills and improving by the day. I believe that I have improved a lot as a creative since the beginning, and doing things like these truly helps me to see beauty in almost everything. It is a shame nowadays people are too much glued to their screens and not really notice everything that is happening around them. Birds chirping, the rays of light shining down perfectly onto the road, the boat rocking gently by the pier etc. Photography has really helped me with this, and if anyone is reading - I urge you to start photographing the beauty of your environment, you will find something beautiful.
This is my first blog post - and hopefully some loyal reader will come across this and enjoy my story - and all the future ones I will be posting daily. Thanks, loyal reader.
