My relationship with photography

I have had a crazy up-and-down relationship with photography. In my childhood and adolescence, I was never familiar with the concept of photography because my family never had a camera. In medical college, I was averse to being photographed. I don't quite know the reason but I wanted myself to be out of every photo that was taken during holiday tours. Maybe it was the fact that I had protruberant teeth and was scared of looking at myself in a photograph.

Then came the era of digital cameras. Some of my friends had a camera that they allowed me to play with. I realized how much fun it was to compose frames and soon learnt that I was good at it. This made me long for a digital camera. Around the time that my folks allowed me to buy one, I lost Chuck’s camera. I had to buy him one for his marriage and I used up my allowance for the same.

For the next five years, my interest in composing photographs stayed put, and yet I couldn’t afford a proper camera. The first camera that I ever owned came in the form of an early camera-phone model from Nokia. I started clicking pictures for documentation—primarily x-rays and MRI scans of patients for making presentations.

Then, I fell in love with Vinokur, an expert photographer. He tried to motivate my photography by gifting me a very good digital camera. This is the first good camera that I have owned. I started taking pictures with it. Vinokur and I would spend hours online and going through the pictures, commenting on them, editing them, and finally posting them on forums like Facebook.

During this period, however, the commenting and editing process started to become tiresome as I didn’t quite understand the reason behind some photos being adjudged as ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Vinokur tried to help me out by showing me examples of photography by the greats which I couldn’t grasp. Soon, our ‘photography sessions’ started becoming annoying and irritating, especially to me. I guess he must have felt disappointed and annoyed too.

Since then, I fear taking the camera. Every time I click a picture, there is a hell lot of ‘baggage’ attached to that frame—about its quality, its cleverness, and its negativities. Taking pictures and editing have become a pain for me. Hence, I have stashed away my camera. I don’t even take pictures using my mobile camera anymore. Why initiate something painful when you have the choice to not?