Let there be light... and bytes!

I never had a blog. I always believed that the purpose of a blog was to contribute and never felt I had something that people would be interested in. And “showing” is not really my style.

My friend and fellow (free-time) nature photographer Tiago Pereira is in a constant dispute with me about this. “Make a blog” he says, “what for?” I reply. Thank you for being enough annoying!

So, the main point for this (besides of someone else looking* at my work) is actually the exercise of motivating me to take even more photographs and, mainly, working on them. The purpose is to create a drive for me to get better at doing something that I love: Nature Photography and meeting new spots where you can stop your mind and open it just to embrace and admire life.

Finally, in a quick insight, I believe my photographer profile is as follows:

• Photography has always been part of my life and is my way to keep memories alive;
• Photography has been put aside for too many times in my life. Seems that life keeps overburdening me with things that seem to be more important;
• I am a late DSLR starter (photographic stuff is way too expensive): by early 2009, I put aside my old 35mm film camera and went berserk on digital full frame. Miss the chemical scents of the lab, though;
•  Everything is interesting to shoot for me. Finding how you can make an interesting photograph out of anything is a quite a challenging task;
•  I shoot to kill*… I mean, for me, the camera is a sniper rifle, not a machine gun. This might be a habit inherited of shooting film. Expensive 36 round cartridges made me disciplined on pressing the shutter button. Shooting should be, in some bizarre way, an elegant and effective exercise;
•  I keep pressing the “delete” button on camera. Never satisfied. Actually, I might have missed some good opportunities because I was too busy deleting photos in-field;
•  Looking at my storage media, most of my photographs are as they were shot. Somehow, I like the “raw” about RAW-format. Maybe that’s my biggest flaw as photographer;
•  Anyway, my goal, when capturing and editing a digital photograph is a mean to make it represent the subject I’ve seen with my eyes as accurately as possible. Even when pushing the boundaries of reality to create some additional impact, it typically falls short on showing the beauty of some of these spots. A photographic frame is just that: a short representation of a memory in some moment in time. And a shareable memory!

* About copyright: I value a lot the time I invest in things and I do not tolerate someone else taking credit (in any form) from my work. Enough said.

 ** By the way... I'm incapable of killing. I respect life, any form of it. On the other end, I don't respect those (humans) that don't respect and abuse from it.