Old love, renewed passion...

I’ve been thinking back a lot over the last week, trying to find some of my old dreams and things that I liked to do before I lost them or simply forgot their status somewhere along the way and I remembered this.

While most of my friends used to collect stickers, I used to collect stamps. It was a much cheaper hobby and for me also much more intriguing than stickers of many cartoon characters that I had never even seen on tv as for the longest time, my parents avoided putting cable tv at home (and I am grateful to them for that!!) However the fact that I had never heard of many of the countries from which I had stamps bothered me much less, in fact I enjoyed that. It meant that I could look it up in an atlas and find out about another country and dream of one day perhaps, visiting there.

I also remember being completely fascinated with taking photos. Most kids are fascinated by cameras, especially the flashes so I guess I wasn’t much different. I remember being very excited and feeling privileged when my parents would let me take a photo. My first ever guideline was to centre the photo. “Make sure the object is in the middle of the frame, okay?” That’s what I was told and I did that with much concentration, I wanted to get it right, I wanted to take a good photo.
Those were the days of manual cameras. Those were the days of looking through a little hole at the top of the camera and not a screen.
Now, I have my own digital camera but I still take photos with that passion, with that zest to get it right, although I have realized that in a field of art, “right” is VERY relative!

My stamp collection has become a redundant passion and my little album sits in a trunk somewhere and perhaps someday I will take it out and have a look at it. However I still have a crazy passion for photography. A kind of passion that will keep me awake at one in the morning taking absolutely random shots. A kind of passion that will make me turn on my laptop at half past one to write about it!! In fact there was even a time when I was seriously considering a career in photography but then I figured that if you take photography away from that part of my life that it holds now, then I would miss it. Something that walks beside me and keeps me company, not something that walks ahead of me nor behind me but with me.