It actually began

a few years earlier, at the end of the summer of 2011.

Some time earlier, my wife and her mother made plans to take the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing. For some reason that I cannot recall neither explain, it took me some time to jump on the (band)wagon so I joined them at the last moment.
Just before we left I bought my first real camera in ten years, an entry-level APS-C camera, Nikon D3100 with a 18-105mm kit lens, and took it together along with the thick manual. I carried that manual over seven-thousand, six-hundred and twenty-one kilometers from Moscow to Baikal lake to Mongolia to Beijing and another four-and-a-half-thousand kilometers up and down China’s east coast, and was never able to read more than a page or two at a time. Reading Paul Theroux’s excellent and very relevant Riding the Iron Rooster, looking out the window and drinking beer with people we just met was way more fun.

The whole time, the camera was on AUTO.

Luckily the landscape was so beautiful that it allowed for plenty of beginner’s mistakes. Here are some of those AUTO mode images (basic edit in Lightroom).

When we returned home, I looked at the images and was pretty impressed. If that’s what happens when the camera makes all of the decisions, what would happen if I took over and turned some dials and pressed some buttons? So I paid a photographer who lived nearby to teach me some photography, but in the course of the first and only session she just told me about technical stuff that I could learn online, for free, on my own. I began to casually watch photography related content on YouTube to learn the basics, and by the time the next milestone came about, a year later, I was already secure enough to have the camera on Aperture Priority. Most of the time, anyway.

It all began...

with this image.

I was riding my bicycle along the Main River bank in Würzburg on a cold autumn evening when I saw this scene, and something about the lines and colors made me get off the bike and reach for the camera. I already took a few shots when I noticed a family walking in front of me, all wearing dark colored coats. The father and one of the children were a falling behind the rest of the family and the father stopped to look over the wall, his kid holding to his leg. I don’t know if it was the overall gloominess of the cold weather and grey sky, or just an autumn feeling, but the father seemed sad, tired, weary. I already had the camera in hand so I shot one with them in the frame, and when I reviewed it later at home, I felt I had to do something with it. There was something about it that fascinated me.

So I looked around a bit and downloaded a trial version of Photoshop Elements. I played around with it for a while before reading any tutorial, pulling sliders all the way in both directions and assessing the result. And the first image I exported was something like that (had to take it from my Facebook page since I deleted it from my hard drive in a wild cleanup some time ago).

This edit blew my mind but also made me understand, 1) that I should probably read the instructions, and 2) that there was probably a middle ground somewhere, in which things can actually look good to people who didn’t share my experience in taking this image and the fun of taking adjustment sliders to the extreme. In short, I needed and wanted to know what I was doing. And that was the beginning of my journey to become a photographer.