Unsplash

14 Feb 2022 - Johannes Ebeling - 1 minutes to read

A couple of weeks ago I’ve submitted pictures I took to Unsplash for the first time. This was a weird experience for me. Photography appears to be such a widespread hobby amongst programmers, that it feels almost too cliché to admit to it publicly. Getting into cameras seems to be just what you do, when you work in technology.

While posting to social media always felt low stakes, publishing you work on a dedicated photography platform like Unsplash felt intimidating.

When choosing some of my first pictures I realised how hard it can be to not be too critical with your own work. The first album I’m going through now contains all the pictures I took during a vacation to Israel. This was one of the most interesting experiences of my whole life, so it seemed like a good choice to start there. But is there anything interesting in there? I mean, most of the “tourist street photography style” pictures mainly make sense to me and a good chunk of the album are basically pictures I took for the sake of having a picture of what I saw during the trip. They are pretty recognisable by their poor composition, contrast and obvious lack of care. I just wanted a picture to remember that when I visited Masada, an ancient Roman fortress, there was a tiny model of the whole structure that had dollhouse-like mosaic floors.

Going through the album made me realise that one motive came up again and again - Flowers.

Everyone likes pictures of flowers. You can look through the profile pictures/home screens of the older part of your family and I bet that a lot of them will have picked flowers to put there. That’s where I started. I edited and uploaded a picture of an almond tree flower. It’s a start and let’s see where this goes.