What is Photography? For me...

     What is photography? I think , it's a projection through the lens of some person's abilities to see and to feel the world. (Wow, it's my thought! I swear! ). Skills mean a lot, of course. But no matter how  skillful you are in drawing, it will not make you a great artist. At the same time world knows artists, who never went to school to study arts. Famous russian Paleh artists, a lot of native artists, even  Salvatore Dali never finished school. English artist Lowry was painting during nights, hiding even from his mom. He never thought of himself as an artist.  Nobody new him as an artist till he was almost 70 years old!.

       It means, that if you have something in you, if you want to draw with your soul,  The God will lead your hand...The same is with photography. If you can SEE, you will see the world even better through the lens. Another thing about photography, that makes it  a miracle - to be able to look at THE MOMENT again and again (not only on paper, but on a computer screen) . But the most attractive for me is not just only to be able to take the picture, that will make myself proud, but the memories of every moment that made it happen. Wandering around, looking at familiar things differently (yes!), cropping the scene in mind, looking under my feet, see not rust or wood, but structure and colour, watching birds and snails, and worms... After that comes motivation to find out the name of the grass, habbits of snails, and, of course, try to find out why the hell I couldn't take that picture the way my virtual photo.net fellows did.  And start over and over again...

                                                             

 Look, how elegant this little diver is! I don't know what his head is doing , but the legs .... acrobat...

I stepped on these snails without thinking - there are tons of them after the rain. One day I NOTICED them  - it changed everything...

Now I know they can live upto 15 years.... They lay eggs, and that egg the baby comes from, is the very top of it's shell.... so the circles show the age (like in a tree)... they are hermophrodites, but they mate, and  they are not so slow, when you are trying to focus...

And they have eyes! Four?  Maybe the picture is not very esthetic - it was my first try of macro lens - but I managed to look into A SNAIL'S EYES!!!

I won't be able to step on them again....

 

 Here are some more things that I see - beautiful colours of a faded flower,

 

a fence's pattern and a log's structure 

And always - flowers....