There are many bloggers who have touched my heart through their words, through the images of life they share on their blogs, one post at a time. And today, I’m very thrilled to welcome here at Sweet Jelly Bean one of these bloggers, KC. I hope you make him feel ‘at home’. – Donah
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What do I see through the lens of a camera?
We all have various reasons to take photos with a camera, and yet there is one simple and fundamental thing in everything we do in life, that life is about making choices. It is a learning process often takes years to develop the instinct in making the right choices. I went through the same process, and landed on making the choice to take photos of people that I closely related to, at home, or at work.
Through the years, I finally realize what I have viewed through the camera is not the lens made of glass, but my heart that filled with love, and the World after the lens, is just an image of myself.
What does photography mean to me?
Like many others, I started photography as my hobby by taking photos of hundreds of different subjects from insects, flowers, to beautiful scenery. After years of exploring, I began to think, what are these photos meant to me? To have the wow from others and then forgotten in the next few seconds?
What triggered me to seriously thinking of making a choice in photography was the (second) serious illness of my father. I suddenly found that I have not many photos of him but hundreds of others. I started to ask myself, what I really want in my photography, and my heart answered, the one I love!
Limitation, is it good or bad?
I used a Minolta SLR film camera with a zoom lens in the 90s. Later I used the Canon compact camera Powershot Pro90 IS, and the Fujifilm Finepix S9600 in the 2000s, before switching to the APS-C sensor camera Sigma DP2.
The difference in the image quality of a small sensor compared to a large sensor was shocking to me. If I were to know this, I would not have invested in the compact cameras back then because it is such a shameful limitation for these compact cameras.
However, Sigma DP2 also comes with various limitations except for its absolutely outstanding image quality in good light condition. The first limitation is that it is a fixed lens camera, and second limitation is that it is virtually impossible to use the camera in low light condition, and thirdly it is slow in autofocusing. These limitations turn out not to bother me so much because I have made the choice of taking photo of people, and I do not want poor contrast image with the lost of details and texture in the dim light condition. In contrary, I became familiar with the characteristic of the lens with various aperture numbers, to learn the skill to take photos of pre-focusing at a distance for fast moving objects, and to understand various capabilities (and shortcomings) of the camera that it has become part of me. The compactness of the camera has even widen the photo taking opportunity due to its portability as compared to a modern DSLR.
Where does the road of photography lead me to?
After all these years, I learned that photography is about how I project myself onto the subject of photography. This is true in many things we do in life. In whatever subject of photography we have chosen, the ultimate aim is how can we communicate with the world through the subject of our photography.
If the subject is people, it is not as straight forward as to taking a portrait photo only. I would ask myself how I want to relate to a person. This will affect the person’s posture, state of relaxation, trust, and comfortability with me being involved in taking his or her photos. If a right communication has been established, the subject will eventually reflect our projection onto them, and become the medium of our message to the world. Life consists of many untold heroes and heroines.
We may not become a professional photographer, but never give up that photography, or any passion in something we do, as it will lead us to our self-discovery about making choices in life, about challenging limitations we have come across, about the messages we want the World to hear, and our heart to listen. I hope, when I look back one day into my photography, it is just like the song that I sing for my life.
Click on thumbnails to view the gallery.
[author image=”https://sweetjellybean.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/KC.jpg.webp” ]KC, is the writer behind River Of The Heart, where he pours love into every post he shares with his readers. He has the brilliance to write the shortest words but with the biggest impact. KC blogs life through his poetry and photography.[/author]