I didn’t think much about photography until 5 years ago. I was going on my first trip to Paris! Paris, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I didn’t even own a camera, so two weeks before I left I went out and bought myself my first point-and-shoot.
I land and with digital camera in hand, I promptly started to take photos of everything. I mean everything. It was all begging to be captured forever on my camera … Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, a wrought iron gate, an apartment building, a sculpture, a flower, another building, a street corner, a garden, a café. Paris is beautiful, so how could I possibly take a bad picture?
I did. I took many, many spectacularly bad pictures of a spectacularly beautiful city. I came to this realization after reviewing a few days’ worth of photos. I was preserving the memory of the trip, but not in the way that I wanted to remember it. Granted I knew nothing about exposure, ISO or lighting, but I did know something about composition and some of my photos showed promise. For the rest of the trip I became more thoughtful about what I was shooting.
When I took the time to really think about how I was framing the photos I felt something inside me shift. I really enjoyed the process of making a picture. I never thought of myself as a creative person, until that moment. But, when I saw this photo, I thought “Wow, I can take a good photo.” And the photographer was born.
