A photo I took using compact camera.
I’m going to share with you a story about how I rediscovered my passion for photography after a long hiatus. It’s funny how life can take you on different paths and make you forget what you once loved. But sometimes, you get a chance to reconnect with your old hobby and find new joy in it. Here’s how it happened for me.
I used to love taking photos when I was a kid. I had a simple film camera that I would use to capture everything around me. I was fascinated by the magic of photography, how it could freeze a moment in time and make it last forever. I enjoyed developing the film and seeing the images come to life in the darkroom. Photography was my creative outlet and my way of expressing myself.
But then, things changed. I moved to Singapore to study when I was in secondary school. It was a big adjustment for me, living with my uncle’s family and going to a new school. I had to make new friends, learn new things, and adapt to a different culture. I was busy with academics and social life, and photography became less of a priority for me. I left my camera behind and never looked back.
I also got interested in other things, like computers and video games. My sister-in-law had a PC that was very advanced for its time. It had an 80286 CPU, 640 KB of RAM, and 20 MB of hard disk space. It sounds laughable now, but back then it was amazing. It could run programs like Lotus 1-2-3, which was like Excel’s ancestor. But I didn’t care much about that. I cared more about the games that I could play on it.
The PC only had a monochrome monitor, which meant it could only display black, white, and 16 shades of gray. But that didn’t stop me from having fun with games like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dungeons and Dragons, Flight Simulator, and more. I was hooked on gaming and wanted to make the PC better. I upgraded the RAM, the video card, and the sound card. The PC became more colorful and more lively. It could play synthetic sounds instead of just beeps. It was like a whole new world for me. Gaming was my main hobby and my escape from reality.
Years passed by and I went through different stages of life: junior college, university, first job, marriage. Photography never crossed my mind during all those years. The only time I used a camera was when my son was born and I bought a compact camera to document his growth. But that was not because I wanted to take photos as an art form. It was just because I wanted to preserve some memories of my son’s childhood. The camera was just a tool, not a passion.
But something changed when I decided to take photography more seriously. How did that happen? Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll try to share it with you in future blog posts …
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