About
When I was a kid, I used to go to drawing class after primary school with my paternal grandfather. I don't really remember why, but I really did hate it. I've never been an artistic person. I enjoyed art (literature, music, and cinematography), but I never made any of it myself. Heck, I don't think I drew more than five paintings for my art classes throughout my whole time at school because I always asked my mum to do it for me. The only thing I drew willingly was little flags of countries from around the world, which I stuck on the wall next to my desk in my room. I had no real way of expressing myself creatively.
At the age of 14, I properly held a camera for the first time. It was my maternal grandfather's Fujifilm X-T30 with a Fujinon XF18-55mm F2.8-4.0 kit lens attached. Grandpa bought it in April 2020 during the COVID lockdown, as he wanted to photograph the night sky and pick up a new hobby during an incredibly isolated time. I spent a lot of time at their house and honestly never cared about that camera, though I did like taking photos on my iPhone. My grandpa would softly insist I try the Fuji out, but I didn't until 2 May 2020.
The evening before, on 1 May, we were taking photos of the night sky. Nothing more than the camera, lens and a tripod. Looking at it now, it was a terrible, terrible photo, but it got me interested. I was impressed by the level of control the camera gave to get the photograph you wanted, and after seeing how much you could edit a RAW file, I was sold. The next sunny day I got up, took the camera and started photographing the garden flowers. I remember zooming into a photo of miniature pink roses, and I was blown away by how sharp the image was and how much detail it held.
From then on, I took photos of the most random things and posted them on my incredibly cringe Instagram profile. The camera would stay at my grandpa's, as I didn't use it that often, but by the end of autumn that same year, I pretty much owned it. I remember watching numerous YouTube guides on how the camera worked, as I was determined to shoot everything in manual and RAW right from the very beginning. I've taken more than a hundred thousand photos, between that X-T30 and my current Fujifilm X-T5. Years passed, and I was taking pictures of bread for my family's bakery business, photographing planes and eventually receiving what felt to me like a huge prize from a local airline.
Photography became an escape for me and a form of self-expression I didn't know I was yearning for. I remember one evening taking photos of puddles and blurry traffic lights on the wet ground in the rain with a long exposure. I really liked a girl at school, and I was also generally coping with my teenage years – if you've been a teenager, you probably know what I mean. Somehow, whatever was going on in my head would turn into me pointing the camera somewhere, changing settings and choosing when to press the shutter. I vividly remember that evening. I think I was exploring my own mind through the camera. The photos were terrible, by the way. It reminded me why I wanted to keep taking photographs in the first place.
Today, photography, for me, is literally how I see the world, and this project is my attempt at sharing my thoughts and feelings through light and colour. I just want to know that somewhere there's a little part of me existing, and I like that somewhere to be this website.
Special credits to my mum for taking the photo of me by the Aral Sea. 3 April 2025, 07:06.