While you're reading this I'm somewhere in Russia, dragging my loyal camera companion Plum to all the pretty places, happily snapping away from what I hope is an original point of view. Photography is a new hobby of mine. My mom always wanted me to give it a shot, which I did... but then I thought everything I did was bad and ugly and uninstagrammable. A look at my old photo albums tells something different. Some of the pictures I took years ago will always be among my favorites. There's a story behind all of them. I want to share those here today.

This was the first picture people ever complimented me on. Yes, those people were all related to me, but when jaws drop you may expect the compliments to be genuine.
I was fourteen years old when I took this picture. It was a lucky shot, a quick snap made while hiking in Mount Shasta National Park in California. I had no idea it had turned out like this until I saw it on my laptop screen back home. It was just one lucky shot, but it was the lucky shot I needed to get interested in photography (even though I never would have admitted that back then).

In 2012 I'd decided photography wasn't for me. After that one lucky shot in California in 2010 I hadn't taken a single pretty picture. Then I went to Australia, which was great and beautiful. But I didn't want to come home with the cliche clicks that everyone has.
One day we went out to see Uluru at sunrise. Everyone stood in exactly the same spot to take the exact same picture of Uluru. I turned away from the masses and chose something else as the center of attention for my picture: the rising sun. It was too bright for a direct click, so I used a nearby shrub as a filter. The result was red as the desert around me, pretty in an unconventional way. I was so proud of finding a new point of view in an overly photographed place. I ran to my mom to show her the picture. When I returned, people were standing in line for my spot to take the exact same picture of the rising sun that I was so proud of, To this day the memory still makes me laugh.

Photography was my thing when I came home from Australia. I still had a lot to learn about it back then. This picture is the perfect example: it was the first time I managed to capture a building in a more or less interesting way, with almost no people in the picture. I say 'almost', because there's exactly one head visible in the lower left corner. That day I learnt the importance of timing and yelling at your friends who are standing in your shot. The picture will always be close to my heart though: every morning when I woke up in Rome, this building was the first thing I saw from my window.
The summer of 2014 was the summer I took pictures of everything that moved, everything that didn't move and everything inbetween while I was at it. I'd never expected to take this shot though. You need luck for it. Not luck to click at this exact moment, but luck to find yourself in such a situation. High up in the Andes in Peru, in the middle of nowhere, it sometimes happens that your bus has to stop at random for a heard of llamas, vicuñas and sheep. It doesn't happen often, but the photographer in me cried with excitement when it happened.

I don't know where to start with this one. I stumbled across a perfect composition (quite literally, because I was trying to run to the other side of the road with crutches). It was one of my first pictures taken with Plum. He captured the colorful, creative and also historical Berlin that I wanted to show the world.

There are a few more of these, pictures that I love but for the way they look and the story they tell. Make sure to follow me on Instagram to see them all. I promise to share all my Russian pictures soon.

Stay Awesome!