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my photoblog | my flickr

I love taking pictures. I’m not a professional/career photographer or any of that sort of thing. I just shoot pictures of things. I can be an equipment geek at times, but I know and realize that a better camera and/or lens will not make me a better photographer. I love film. I still use film, though rarely. My favorite film to date has to be Ilford XP-2 Super. The grain and latitude are gorgeous. Right now, I almost exclusively shoot a Nikon D90 with a 35mm f1.8 DX lens. I swap this with a 50mm f1.4 when I need to get a little bit closer. I have a couple of kit zoom lenses that I’d throw away if they didn’t come in handy for shooting wide.

I like street photography, landscapes and portraits. While I do take a lot of other kinds of pictures, these have to be my favorite. Where I currently live (The Glorious Philistinedom of the UAE) doesn’t allow for much landscape photography, so I mostly shoot landscapes and street. If you managed to read this far, you can read the story of how I got into photography:

I got my first camera 13 years ago. It was a Kodak KB-10. It came with a free roll of Kodak Gold ISO200 film. I wasted this by pulling all of it out of the canister. After I shot it all. I wanted to look at the pictures. I was quite disappointed with what I saw, even more so when I was told that I would never get the images back. I was sad for quite some time, and went and bought another roll of film. Having learnt my lesson, I always loaded and unloaded my film in complete darkness, always afraid of the slightest hint of light.

I was ten years old then. I took pretty funny pictures. Most of them were just pictures of grownup people’s knees. Or chests, if I managed to point the camera up. I never really shot anything interesting, since I lived in an apartment. To add to my misery, I wasn’t allowed to go out. My mother had this never dying fear that I’d get Tourette’s if I played with the kids from the block. Our’s wasn’t much of a block anyway. A couple of buildings, and nothing around for miles but sand. I got bored of that camera pretty quick. I don’t know where it is now. And then I went on a hiatus.

I scored a Chinon 358RZ from an uncle in 2003. Chinon is jap-speak for “You are poor and can’t afford an SLR so pretend this is one”. It was a nice camera. My interest in picture taking got stirred up a bit, but I was finding it a bit hard to afford processing and printing. I still stumble on un-developed rolls every now and then. I might take them to the photo-lab some day. I don’t remember what I shot with that camera. It was replaced by a Taiwanese digital point and shoot the following year. 3.4 megapixels, macro mode, LCD screen, movie recording! FREE SHOOTING! My film camera was no competition.

For three years, I took pictures of garden plants in macro mode, people’s faces in portrait mode, videos of people walking by and light paintings. I also managed to sneak in a few good pictures, but this was rare. But now my interest in photography was piqued, and I began buying lots and lots of old magazines (NAT GEO mostly), just to look at those gorgeous landscapes, and the snow leopards! I was living with my uncle in Lahore at that time, and I begged to borrow his Canon T50. He let me have it!

I made magic with that camera. It had a 35-105mm f3.5 lens. I started taking pictures. At first, everything was either blurred, too dark or too bright. I picked up a Kodak’s Guide to Photography (which I still have), and learned the basic numbers of ISO, f-stop and shutter speed. I got better at it. I was still shooting Kodak Gold when I stumbled upon Kodak TMAX, and fell in love with black and white. Some of my favorite pictures are with this camera:

Excuse my horrible composition skills. I wasn’t really good with focusing as well. This was probably because I needed glasses and didn’t wear them. I still like the photo. I wish I still had the negative. Some other shots from my early days that I’m really proud of:

I took a lot of photos with the T50. I was in love with it. I did not know much at all about fancier cameras, and was really happy with what I had. Then the day came when I had to leave Lahore and my uncle’s T50 behind. I was back home in Dubai, with nothing but a sorry excuse for a camera called a BenQ 3410. I had thrown away my Chinon in Lahore. It was shopping time.

Nikon had to be it. Nearly everyone I knew had prime Nikon glass lying around. And I was getting a really good deal on the D50. So I got the D50, liked the kit lens and never bothered grabbing a beautiful 24mm f2 off my cousin. By the time I realized how great that lens would have been for me, it was gone. He’d given it away for lunch money. I did mourn that opportunity for quite some time. I did, however, manage to get a great deal on a 50mm 1.4 AI lens (I have since sold this in order to buy the AF-D version of the same lens) a short while later. With this lens, I had to shoot fully manual. No AE or AF. That taught me a lot. Now that I have lenses that my camera can meter with, I don’t need to shoot manual, but I still tend to do it. I’d like to be able to do video some day.

If you’ve read all this, no doubt you’re quite teary-eyed by now. Send me some film, that should cheer you up.