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.