Hello everyone !

For me, photography will be forever related to my grandfather who was a real "gear fanboy" and had a very nice collection of analogue cameras. Unfortunately, he died when I was 6 years old. I took my first shots whit him. Of course, my favorite camera was a Polaroid 600 : when you are a child, waiting for weeks to see your pictures is almost the same thing than waiting for years ... I called this camera the "photo-tout-de-suite". I still have it and love it ...

During my childhood, I kept up practicing analogue photography (mushroom macro was already my favorite playground). However, I didn't took the "digital turn" at the end of the 90' : for me, the first digital pictures looked disgusting, especially skin tones (ISO 400 looked like the today ISO 12800). So because analogue photography became "old fashioned" and because I wasn't satisfied with digital photography, I just stopped taking pictures for about 10 years ...

In 2013-2014 I went with my girlfriend (who is now my wife) for a trip around the world. Taking picture was absolutely not a priority. At this time, I had the idea that taking picture was something that prevented people from living the present moment ( do you remember this time when people were unable to watch a show without filming it with a smartphone ? ... this period was quite depressing indeed ...). So we left Switzerland with a simple Sony compact camera.

Of course, when we saw our first real beautiful landscapes in the US (it was Badlands National Park), I fell back in childhood. I discovered that taking picture gives me a kind of discipline in my way of seeing what was around me. I am amazed by all the details you start to notice when you go more and more seriously into photography: the light changing during the day, the weather, the season, the reflection in the streets, the expression of people and so on ... All things that a lot of people just don’t see …

So I make almost all the trip with the Sony camera and I was pretty happy with it. However, it get some serious damages during the trip and became more and more difficult to use (for example, the screen was broken, the only way to zoom out was to turn it off). So when we left China, I decided to buy my first DSLR. Of course, my first shots were less good than the one I took with the compact. It took time to learn how to use it ...

So when I went back home, I keep up practicing ... The need of sharing picture on Flickr appeared when I wanted to know what level I had : my family and parents told my that my pictures was good enough ... (but good enough isn't good enough right ?) ;)

So I entered in the big ocean of social media sharing photography. I realized that I had some relatively decent shots, but at the same time I saw how many very good people were doing amateur photography exactly like me ... I also realized that certain kind of pictures were most likely to have success than others. So, even if I didn't liked the idea, I adapted my practice to the "flickr standards" (For instance, don't you find totally unfair that portrait oriented pictures are less visible and have systematically less success?)

I am now still practicing in this fashion, and I wonder what will be the next step. I know that taking "nice pictures" pleasing people on social media is cool but not totally satisfactory. There's no hurry, but I think more and more about it ...