But first a little bit of a background. I was introduced to photography at the age of 14 by my dad, who handed down to me his trusty Nikon F801. It soon became pretty clear that I had a reasonable natural talent for it, and it quickly became my biggest passion in life. Over the following years I devoured books on the subject, not just technical textbooks and all but also pure picture books. Life magazine pictorials, National Geographic magazines, published works of the great established photographers. I was the house photographer for my high school's yearbook, covering the events and whatnot. Naturally, the internet was an amazing place to discuss and showoff works with other shutterbugs via photography forums and such.
Then something happened. It was around 2006, when I graduated from high school. For no reason whatsoever I can think of, I suddenly almost completely lost interest in connecting with others in photography discussions, be they online or offline. My internet persona in photo forums simply went dead. I remained passionate as ever and continued to take photos, but was no longer interested in showing in displaying them to others. Thus I went into almost total recluse mode and my works for nearly 4 years were seen by almost no one. I had no interest in my works being praised or critiqued from others and went solely on pure gut feeling and intuition on what makes a good picture for that period (and for most part, still do to this day). I gravitated towards the street genre, and having always loved black and white photography began to delve more deeply into it, trying to craft a personal look to my works.
And that pretty much sums up my journey in this art to this day, and also explains why I have only discovered flickr as a great source for inspiration in recent weeks. Also, being really bored in a college town over the summer with no school in session, I began to experiment a bit with studio like photography, working with artificial lighting. Being almost exclusively an available light photographer before this despite owning a few speedlights, this was something almost a brand new aspect of photography to me although I have had experience setting up lights as an assistant before. I must say that despite a lack of experience in directing models (ie, friends who have no modelling experience) that sometimes shows in the photos, I'm pretty glad at the ease I've been able to setup the lighting to get exactly what I want. And on that note, I'll end with a picture I shot over the weekend. It wasn't a real serious shoot, and has no real emotional impact, but my friend and I were just having a good time, drinking a little (as you can see from the half finished bottle) and decided it would be fun to do a casual session.
