rekindling an old love...

you know, i always enjoy looking at a beautiful scenery. or maybe just a wag of a dog's tail excites me. or a baby's twinkling eyes due to tears after a little tantrum thrown. these are just some of the moments that i would love to capture. what the eyes could see, would be lost somewhere in memory. but what if i could capture it? freeze the moment. make a story out of it. tell a tale. wouldn't it be interesting?

photography. it freezes those priceless moments, those precious emotions. and a lot of stories to tell. when i was younger, Dad used to have a Yashica camera. i forgot the model number. but it was a vintage camera and he bought it 2nd hand from his, er... biras... What do call you call biras in English? Ok, my mother's bro-in-law. He got my Dad interested in photography. Dad used to lug that heavy-duty camera whenever we went out for outings with all his lenses and special accessories. And we used to be his models. Maybe somehow, the photography bug hit me then. As I grew up, I love taking photos. I remember all the camera models I used to play with. From film to digital. From big to small. From fat to slim. From basic black to colour.

and wonders of wonders, work also involves photography. how to run away and say, "No, photography is not my thing."? IT IS MY THING. just sadly, i don't have the right equipment. i mean i do take good pictures. but you know, there's always something in every picture that i know i can do better with. and an automatic, compact, point and shoot camera isn't going to give me all those results. and so, photography still goes on but amateur-ly...

and then work gave me a chance to go on a basic photography workshop. with the work's D70 DSLR, i went to the workshop. seriously, i thought what can that heavy, nearly 10 years old camera do. there were a lot of buttons on the camera, but i know nuts about them. and it doesn't help that i have fellow workshop mates who carry a cannon, an olympus E-P3, and a Lumix. Depression tahap gaban lor...

and i was in for a great shock. what their cameras could do, my cameras can do them to. maybe not as good, but hell, it was similar. 1st day the instructor asked me what do i want to achieve at the end of the workshop. i only answered that i wanna fall in love with my camera. and at the end of the three-days workshop, i fell in love HEAD OVER HEELS with my camera.

2nd day of the workshop was the best. we had a field trip to Botanic Gardens. And I think I must have been like a gila woman running around taking pictures. coz now i know what the buttons on the camera meant. i control the camera. i got out of automatic mode. i tell the camera what i want. my instructor told me everyone can take pasar malam photos - photos which show you everything. but that's not what we wanna show. we wanna show what is essential. we wanna show what our eyes capture. if i see a beautiful flower, i wanna show only the flower, not the leaves, not the trees or shrubs behind the flowers.

i really really enjoyed the workshop. taking pictures isn't hard if we tell the camera what we want. the instructor was an excellent teacher. he tells a story with every topic. now, of course, i don't have the financial ability to buy a kick-ass high end camera. but that's where i wanna end up eventually. coz i know my love is right there. in photography. what my Dad started and stopped, i wanna continue. i will of course enrol myself in more workshops once i get a power gedemak camera. may Allah make it easy for me, if it's fated for me, InShaa Allah...

oh well, i can go on and on about an old love rekindled but anyway, just enjoy the pictures. i know they are nothing fantastic, what more taken with a borrowed camera hehehe... they are too basic. but i know how much i've jumped from knowing nothing to knowing certain things. enjoy the pics.

and oh, don't forget to go to johnarifin.com or his facebook page Nature@Work. awesome instructor, amazing photographer and best teacher. i'd definitely go for his classes in the future, In Shaa Allah...

Ilal Liqaa'...!!