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.