The first week of May has already passed and I’ve gotten two potential job offers after weeks of job hunting with no luck! To calm my nerves and reward myself, I’ve been photographing with my trusty Pentax ME Super and on one particular Sunday, I was able to head to Alpine Groves (my favorite natural park for now!) to photograph and enjoy the sounds of nature around me.
Even if it was only for an hour and a half.
But shooting with my Pentax camera got me thinking about what subjects I like to photograph and what kind of film I like using. I don’t have an answer to the latter, but the former, I can probably answer.
I love shooting natural, unaltered environments and through my days in college, I discovered I don’t mind making myself the subject of my photos to tell a story about myself. . . or to tell any kind of story in general. I usually get my inspiration from the movies I watch, the characters I become fascinated with through the pages of books, and even through the short stories I write on my spare time.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve never really liked scenes that were heavily altered or created in editing programs like Photoshop and the like. Sure they were fascinating to look at, but I wasn’t really invested in them. It just felt. . . weird and foreign to me. Like they were beautiful at a first glance, but I could easily tell they were just fantasy.
I prefer to shoot with natural light than artificial light or a setup in a studio. Perhaps that will change one day, but natural light tends to give me the naturally beautiful look I aim for in a large portion of my work.
The more that I start to analyze why I do photography, the more I realize that being a photographer was actually meant to be somewhat of a personal hobby of mine. Of course I would still offer my photographic services to small events and to whomever hires me for a short period of time. But doing it as a profession. . . I fear that it will take the fun out of photographing things and places.
So for now, I will keep shooting for my own enjoyment due to the pleasure it brings me on my most chaotic days. After all, the mechanical click of a shutter, the reloading of film into said camera, and the processing of film are all so wonderful to me!
le fleur artsy 