Refreshed, and developments

Refreshed

I've been taking photographs for five years. 

But first a disclaimer. When I say 'photographs' I mean as an 'art' and a passion, not just "I once took a picture of my family standing around a fountain" or "I took a nice selfie of my outfit the other day" (though arguably, selfies can be a modern, more accessible form of the self-portrait, but I stand-by the fact that just because you take a photo doesn't mean you're a photographer).

When I say 'photographer' I mean someone who takes photographs with the intention of having meaning. Being a photographer means a photograph isn't just an image, but it represents your passion and something a little bit more. Anyone can press the shutter, and anyone can know what all the fancy words mean (aperture, ISO, white balance, full-frame...) but that doesn't make you a photographer, per se.

I admit that sometimes I take photographs today and I don't feel quite like a photographer at all. I feel much more like a documenter, really. Or sometimes I feel like a hybrid between the two. Or sometimes I feel like I'm worthy of neither. 

But that's something I'm still figuring out.

I recently completed my upgrade in camera gear. A complete overhaul in my old equipment, with an upgrade that I don't intend to replace for a long time to come (mostly because, well, cash money). And as always, I managed to walk away from Digital Camera Warehouse with more than just a few lenses and a camera, but with a heavy dose of free reflection.

But before a walk down memory lane, a few developments.

Changes

My photography's going to take a change. 

With the realisation that photography lost most of its meaning to me earlier this year I decided to take back my passion. I'm still taking the baby-steps but I'm working on it. They say 'For this New Year's resolution I'm going to do this!' and I often would say 'My New Year's resolution is 1080pp!' (though, to be fair, it really ought to be 2.4k now). I still don't have a New Year's resolution but in the next chapter of my life I'd like to focus a bit more on photography as a passion. The last year has been a lot of event photography -- a lot of professional photography, but less of a passionate photography.

I'll still document, I'll still do the same things I used to do, but I do hope I can aim to focus more on a passion rather than an obligation.

And that means my blogging style has to change.

Often I think about my blog and I wonder what the point of it is. The several thoughts that run through my mind are 'What's the point? No one even reads it.', retorted with 'That may be true, but you blog for yourself, not for anyone else! It's something you enjoy so keep doing it, and anyone else who disagrees can go up themselves!', and then I always end up questioning what I should blog about exactly.

And I'm sick and tired of writing about 'Today I did this' and 'Last week I went here'. I've been doing that for the last six years and it's getting a little boring. And then I feel obliged to take photos of every single thing I do or place I go, just because I 'need to update my blog about it'. And that's not what I really want to do, honestly.

So a change in the wind is coming. I still don't know for sure what I'll be writing about but perhaps they'll be more interesting. I'm thinking along the lines of... well, more interesting things. My life isn't perhaps the most interesting topic out there -- there are plenty of topics to choose from and comment about. Perhaps they'll be book reviews, or reflections, or things I've learned, or recommendations. Perhaps reflections on travel, culture, beliefs. Perhaps it'll be badly-written-social-commentary-from-a-nineteen-year-old. Perhaps.

Perhaps it'll just be a shout of meaningless/meaningful (subjective) words into the void of the Internet, and perhaps -- just maybe -- somewhere across the world, sometime in the next x amount of years before I die, someone will read a post of mine and think 'Hey this post actually means something to me! I learned something!' and then perhaps I'll feel just a little better about wasting so much time on this website typing away to no one in particular.

But who knows, maybe not. Or maybe so. Whatever.

The point is, mark this as the end of posts of the 'Today I did this' style. Out with the old, in with the new. It won't be what I did that day but rather what that day taught me, and discussions on that, because really, that's what we're here for.

Anyway, on with the flashback, in celebration of how far I've come since I first picked up a camera. Five years baby, we've come a long way (and improved a heap). It goes to show how skill develops with time; ever so slowly, day by day, you learn and improve, and at the end of five years you finally turn around and you whisper "Wow, I've come so far."

And son, you really have.

Flashbacks

Cheers to terrible editing (you can clearly see the copy/paste lines) and potato quality (this was taken on a video camera).

My first ever edit. Just to start things off. Oh how it makes me cringe.

On the 15th of July, 2010, we bought a new camera. A digital camera, at that. In fact, I still have it; a mauve-pinkish rectangular baby that could fit inside your pocket with ease. Mind you, the reason why we purchased this new camera was because someone managed to drop the old camera down a flight of stairs at Port Stephens causing it to break (that may or may not have been me), so it was ironic that I was the first one to pick up this new camera and take photos with it.

"Jason, jump for me."

That was what started it all.

Yeah.

And... let's be honest here, the photos are pretty shit. I'm soft-serving it. The image above was one of the better ones because even today I'm too embarrassed by the horrendous quality of these photos to even post some of the worse ones.

But I quickly became obsessed with photography. Over the next month I took many, forcefully featuring my brother and cousin as models, with doses of attempts at being 'deep and meaningful'.

Even with my own shitty watermark!
I'm sorry, 'shitty' is probably going to feature frequently throughout this post because really, that's what it is.
Seriously though, did 'focus' even mean anything to me back then?

I started to try and get in touch with my creative side and attempted to produce better images, after realising that half of the five hundred pictures saved on the SD card were actually... well, pretty bad.

I suppose back then I had the ability to look at a photo and realise that it was a bad image. Poor composition, terrible lighting, misjudged focus -- as a naive thirteen year old I was able to recognise these features in all of my terrible photos, but at the same time, I struggled to correct them.

But nonetheless I tried. This was probably the best image I had taken to that day in July, and I was unbelievably proud of this one for a long time to come.

In hindsight it's pretty shi-- pretty poor, but at the time it was my pride and glory. I think I even showed my parents and uploaded it on deviantart (oh god)

I suppose it marks a time when I started to think about composition, and lighting, and now an image is put together. Whether I was good at it or not is another story, but at the very least I started to become aware of it.

Slowly I started to realise the wonders of editing, and how that opened up various new pathways for me to take. I started using PaintTool SAI as an editing software and new things came to mind. One of the photos I was most proud of for a long, long time was this one.

(And before you ask, yes, do feel free to cringe so hard that you almost form permanent wrinkles, because this image deserves nothing less. But hey, when I was thirteen I thought it was pretty deep.)

This was on Facebook for a while, too, and it became a post for everyone to tag current couples in. Sort of a public noticeboard so everyone could share gossip and announce their new boyfriend/girlfriend to the world. Yep. I know, cringe.

But the point of this is that I started to edit photos.

A month or two of dipping my toes into photography and editing, I decided to change my electives and pick 'Photography and Digital Media (PDM)' to study for a year in 2011.

And that changed the entire path of my life, as overly-dramatic as that sounds (though, really, a lot of things change the path of your life).

PDM was a rush and flurry of learning the ropes to photography and photoshop, and analysing meaning in images. It was, perhaps, the first interactions I had with my now good friend and work partner LQ (I admit I didn't even realise we were actually in the same class until 2014).

I started to add meaning to my images because, well, that's what PDM was supposed to do. I started to realise that anyone can take a photo that looks good, but the thing at the core of photography wasn't a photo, but art.

I was also insanely proud of this image, which was submitted to a competition (alas, I did not win, nor even get into the finalists).
It was supposed to represent the importance of toys and 'fun' to young children, thus adding 'colour' to the ever-bleak world of adulthood that children were thrust into. Supposedly.

But the end of 2011 marked a change. Because I made a friend who advised me about camera gear, and a few months later I found myself finding the courage to ask my parents for a hefty sum of money to purchase a camera.

I was surprised they let me, so a month later I found myself holding a Nikon D7000 with a standard kit lens. That began my relationship with DSLRs. For anyone who remembers, I named it Nikon Nugget.

But, remember, just because you have the gear doesn't mean you have what it takes.

Here! Look at this shitty picture of a chandelier! One of the first I took!

It's not shitty! It's just abstract!

I realised soon after getting my hands on this baby that it wasn't just about the gear. You can still take terrible photos using expensive gear (as I learned from first hand experience), so I tried to put a bit more thought into my photographs before I took them.

This was taken within the first week of my new camera. I was, also, incredibly proud of this image. I even made it my desktop wallpaper and kept it for a long time.

And, oh this is a big milestone, for I finally discovered portraits.

Something clicked with me with portrait photography. Up until this point I had really only ever focused on still life, and that was nice but it wasn't the thing for me. But portraits, oh portraits.

It was also at this time I realised how useful having a younger brother is -- especially at an age when I could tell him to pose for me without any hint of rebellion (this is, arguably, changing as he turns a ripe-old age of ten this year).

I distinctly remember being so 'wowed' by this image. I couldn't stop looking at it -- how it captured my brother and his face and his youth. How captivating his eyes were, and how beautiful a portrait can be. To this day, I admit, I still really like this image.

I started branching into editing and projects. I have an abandoned folder lying in the recess of my computer named 'Shoes' and it is literally a set of photographs of my shoes in various locations and positions. Yeah. I don't know where that was supposed to go but clearly it didn't really go anywhere.

A moment of silence for all my failed projects and unfinished visions.

But occasionally there were ones that I ended up being quite proud of. 

Supposed to mean something like 'Don't wait for other people to make music for you; make your own music' since I had literally drawn my own music notes. Something deep like that. I was fifteen, okay.

Yes, I was one of those people that made things like this back then. I'm not sure what to think of it in hind-sight, but it was a stepping stone of 'meaning' that I slowly began (or tried to) incorporate to the images I took.

Anyone who knew me through the latter half of high-school will know of my 'levitation' phase. To be honest, it continued for several years and I don't remember exactly which post I was inspired by, but it became a bit of an obsession and I really enjoyed it.

I enjoyed it not because of the wow-factor (okay, maybe a tiny bit), but mostly I loved it because of the effort I had to put into it. Never before had I had to input so much effort, time, and hard-work to take an image (Many chairs, self-timers, and lots of patience. One or two times I fell and almost seriously injured myself), and then spend equally as long editing the photo and making it as perfect as I could.

Soon I found myself in possession of a new lens; a macro (yes, I know, perhaps not the most logical progression of lenses for a rookie beginner). I found an entire new beauty of exploring things from a different view. Quite literally, seeing things from another perspective, and I had such a sudden desire to share it. I thought it was amazing that using some special-made glass you could see something so incredible, and even share it with others. That, in itself, was enough to get me hooked.

Yes, I started using little watermarks in the corner. That deviantart is highly inactive now.

In mid 2012 I went overseas. For the first time I took my camera overseas in an attempt in travel photography, and ever since then it's been something I actively look forward to. There's nothing quite like trying to capture a culture and way of life in a set of photographs.

This also marked when I started street photography. At the time I wasn't aware of what that meant -- to me, I was just a tourist taking photos of things around me, including plants, cars, shops, and people. I wasn't aware of what street photography really meant, nor did I have any idea of how much I'd end up loving it.

I did not realise the small kid at the front of the vehicle till afterwards when I was going through my photos.
It came as a shock, and although this image wasn't the best in terms of photo-nomics (composition, focus, shutter speed, etc.), I kept it because of the culture it captured.

And then, a-ha, I moved onto something that I still try and preserve today. Self-portraits.

Some like to call them 'selfies', and I admit, selfies are an interesting new 21st Century development because they represent an easily accessible form of self-portrait. How do we picture ourselves? is an interesting question to ask.

At the time it was probably just the thought 'I want a new display picture' which compelled me to take a shot at self-portraits. And occasionally that's still the reason today. But occasionally it becomes not so much a focus on a new display picture (now-a-days, most often my self-portraits don't even make it to Facebook) and rather focus upon a depiction of myself. 

As a photographer I've heard the comment on many occasions 'There are hardly any photos of you!' or 'You won't be in the picture, then!' which although is true and slightly sad in group photos, self portraits are a way I can make up for that.

It's an entirely different thing when you're taking a self-portrait, as I had learned in my first self-shoot. You can't actually see what the camera sees at the same time -- you can't instruct the model to move left or right or sit straight or move their arm two degrees in an upward direction -- you have to work with a little bit of guesswork and a lot of experience. Add a bucket-full of patience and trial-and-error and maybe, just maybe, you'll get a decent image.

And there's nothing quite like that rush of relief and emotion when you press the 'playback' button on the camera and see a good image of yourself. When your arm isn't cut off in frame, you're in focus, you're smiling, not blinking, and everything (lighting, composition, colours) is finally acceptable.

But I promptly fell in love with portraits. Not just the rush of taking a self-portrait, but also of other people. Soon came my first ever portrait-shoot which was actually part of a favour for a friend, and also an avenue I wanted to take to try my hand at portraits. I was keen to branch out from taking portraits of just my brother and myself. For once I'd be able to work with someone else and I knew it would be an entirely different experience.

From the first official portrait shoot I ever had

I'll save a photography gush on portrait photography for later (one is sure to come soon, I can feel it) but it was such a big learning curve.

I started trying to capture meaning, and I soon began to recognise that feeling of 'YES' when you see an image in your playback that is just right.

I'm not sure how to explain it, but there are moments when you see an image and you just think 'Yes, this is the one. This is it.' and that was exactly how I felt when I saw this image. 'You can delete all the other ones because this is the one.'

One of my favourites because I felt it captured my brother and his excitement incredibly well.

This was a time when I was really getting into my prime in photography. But this was also when something unfortunate happened and the camera that had held my hand step-by-step this entire time was snatched away from me (quite literally stolen from me). I lost my 'baby' and a part of me felt like I had lost a bit of myself. It was, after all, the camera that had witnessed me grow from a complete and utter noob into someone who actually was semi-decent at taking photos.

Long-story short, a new camera came my way (the D7100, kudos to my wonderful, loving friends who I will never ever forget or repay). This one named Nikontinued because I just wanted to make a decent pun.

New beginnings, and this point marked a change in my life when I really started getting into 'professional' photography. Photography was no longer just a hobby I practiced in my backyard. It became a passion I shared with others and used for a purpose.

One of the first photos taken on the new D7100

Although I often talk about 'professional' photography as it was a burden, it's not really. It depends on how you see it. Getting into 'professional' photography (that is, photography where you're paid or hired to do a particular thing for someone else; selling your services, so to speak) was a change in my life that I do not regret because I learned a lot about things and also myself. I also like to think it improved my skills a decent bit, because man oh man, there's nothing quite like trying to cram four (?) photoshoots in a row, each lasting twenty-five minutes, in the same location with absolutely no time for toilet breaks.

Yes, I'm talking about #VALEDICTORY

But it was one of the most rewarding photoshoots I've ever done, and ultimately it was such a positive experience.

Here came a year of service, starting off with our first out-of-school photoshoot/job. This one, we actually did for a very small fee. By that I mean we were pretty much paid in peanuts. As in, we were literally paid in food. Literally.

Classic selfie to commemorate the moment

A year of development followed, with a warp and change in what photography meant to me. Project after project, photoshoots throughout, and photography events dotted here and there.

It was a busy year, but also a year to step back and see how things have changed. A year of growth, both as a part of #Selective and also as an individual freelancer photographer.

An unused shot from #MONOCHROME

Trying to discuss this in a level-headed perspective, I think it's justifiable to say I've improved since July 2010. In fact, I've improved a lot. Frequently I look back at these old pictures and think to myself "Wow Manjekah, you've actually improved so, so much." and it's always a constant reminder that everyone starts somewhere, and often you start at rock-bottom. It would have been so easy for me to have given up right at the start when I realised my images were, let's face it, pretty shit. But I didn't, and somehow I've gotten this far. But that also doesn't mean there isn't more room for improvement. 

And it makes you think, doesn't it? It makes you think about all the skills and talents that have become hidden away in your life because of a variety of reasons. What if I actually did ballet? What if I continued gymnastics and choir? What if I kept working at drawing and painting?

They aren't questions I have the answers to, but it makes you wonder. And it also makes you wonder where you'll be in another five years. Five years from now, where will I take myself in that time?

And so that brings us to now. Where am I now? 

It's not infrequent when I come across someone who labels me a photographer. Each time I hear them do so I hesitate a bit and I'm not sure how to react. Am I a photographer?

I'm still making out the steps to figure out what it means to me, particularly in this time of my life when I've been swamped with responsibilities and other hobbies and found myself completely lacking time to follow all of my passions.

But I've come to accept that photography is always going to be a part of me. What that precisely means, well I'm still figuring that out! But for the meantime, I've got a new set of gear, a fresh mind of ideas, and a heart full of newly-served passion.

Vivid Sydney 2015

This is officially me singing off until I return back from overseas.

New posts will be in the New Year (with the exception with one post I wrote before I left which is scheduled for the next few days), and they will hopefully be different to what I've had so far. Perhaps first is a gush on portraits. Or maybe social commentary on culture overseas. Or maybe discussions on 'New Year resolutions'. Or maybe all of them. Who knows? Let's see where the night takes us.

Signing off, Manj.

Stay hydrated, kids. And do the things you love.

Here's an overly-excited me taking a first selfie with the darl, to be named.

In a year I'll take another one of those 'one year ago' shots and probably collage it together.