Photography

I seriously did not need another hobby. But there is something so fascinating about "learning something just because I want to" that I brought my five year old DSLR out of its bag and played around with the settings. I am not new to photography. When I first learned the how-to's of it, I was not even ten. At fourteen, I took pictures of an entire fortnight's trip to the Himalayas with an old Kodak camera (the ones that came in leather cases). At that time those were film cameras that did not show you on a scale how your exposure is, nor would it let you "see how the shot came" before you send the whole film to be developed. There were people who found out that their pictures came out horrible, but I am truly proud of the fact that I always had 38 shots (you could take a couple more than the standard 36 if you were really good) and none of them were badly under or over exposed. The camera was also fantastic. It was really difficult to mess the settings up. I remember once at Agra Fort (in 2001) I took a picture of some intricate wall carvings with the "distance" set to 1 m. Then I was taking the picture of the rampart of the fort and forgot to change the "distance" to infinity. The picture came out quite ok. Not as sharp as I wanted it to be, but not blurry either.

With National Geographic having this "Your Shot" thing, it has been quite a nice vent of my photography rather than littering my Facebook wall. The good thing about Nat Geo is I can see other people's fantastic pictures and even though mine are nothing in comparison to the photographers there, it feels good to contribute my bit. Photography opens your eyes to see beauty in simple things already around you. One leaf drenched in water, my kitty's whiskers, black and white shot of fallen snow on branches... you don't have to look far. Also, there's a community of photographers from all over the world. It's because of them that I know how pretty the country of Turkey is, I can practically see villages of Bangladesh, beaches from Florida, wild life of Africa... and I realize once more, how beautiful is our Earth with its people...