Balaji Dutt's photostream  

I won't claim to be one of those who loved photography from birth, but I always found photography cool - especially the ability of a photograph to take you back to a moment in time otherwise forgotten.

When I was growing up, photography was prohibitively expensive - colour film was expensive and developing labs few and far between. The family camera when I was a kid was a fixed focus film camera that took only blurred images :). Photography then was reserved for events and even then restricted to maybe 2 rolls of 24-shot film - you learnt to shoot nothing but the most important details.

Even later, when cameras, film and developing became cheaper, photography still remained a mechanism of record rather than an extension of memory.

In 2005, when I finally purchased a digital camera, my initial photos reflected the same philosophy - a record of events and places I had been to. It was only in early 2006 that I joined Flickr, primarily out of the need for a place to archive my photo collection and unhappy with the restrictions that most other photo-sharing websites placed.

One day, I stumbled across a group for flickrites in Singapore and it so happened they were going to meet up right next door to where I worked. I decided to check it out (hey free schwag was on offer :) ) and encountered a group of people, passionate about this art and generous with their friendship, time and advice.

I came back, added the names of those people I had met as contacts and watched in wonder, as their photographs told compelling tales of where they had been and what they felt. I picked up my camera hoping to be able to capture the same magic.

I'm still very far away from the standards set by some of the inspiring people I see on Flickr, but the journey has it own rewards, and they are there for the world to see on my photostream.

Cameras:
Nikon Coolpix 5600

Software:
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Organizing photos and Image Editing)
Adode Photoshop CS3 (If Lightroom can't salvage the shot..)
GeoSetter (for geo-tagging images)

Flickr-Inspirations:
pfong
Ashwin
nj_dodge