Hi!

Welcome to the website of a keen amateur photographer.

After many years of photo-idleness, I’m returning to taking pictures with quite a „stage fright“ and with humbleness. For the last time, I would set out before dawn to the still sleeping Prague downtown or to the fog-veiled river at dayspring sometime in 1980.

You know that. You get up when still dark outside and go out to take pictures. You get to the spot just in time before brake of day with quite a clear idea what to do and how. Then you go home with hundreds of photos on your memory card and with a tense expectation, with wavering hope that at least one of them is going to be the one you crave to create.

Then you look through your pictures one after another and you find out there might be just a few of good ones which you can easily count on fingers of one hand.

So you edit these few photos in Photoshop, you are toiling away at it for hours.

So so satisfied with the result you send your pictures in the world. But just after that you start to be consumed by doubt if someone else will like them. You don’t like them any more, you’re not contented any more, you had best delete these pics. Yet you don’t have any others. So you wait for reactions impatiently.

I don’t want to shoot the reality around me. I yearn for taking a picture emanating the mood I felt when pressing the shutter release, emanating my immediate state of mind and uniqueness of that moment. I don’t care what I take pictures of – nature, a city, a portrait, things… Capturing the impression, the air is the only thing I’m interested in.

My great and unattainable paragon are the Impressionists, especially Vincent van Gogh. But I can’t paint at all. Thus I’m left with trying to capture the moment by pressing the shutter release.

It can turn out variously:

• It’s a success. The photo radiates the atmosphere of that moment, everyone can feel it and they’re enthused by it. It will never come out this way, I know that.
• The picture will remind me at least of the ambience of that moment when I took it, while the others will like it and might be willing to frame it and hang it on a wall in their apartment. Beautiful vision. If this comes true, I’ll be exhilarated.
• The result is just a nice picture. People will take a look at it and might say: „Really good,“ and that’s it. Well, hopefully most of my photos.

I’ll be glad if you check my albums. Perhaps at least a few of my pictures will appeal to you.

And I’m looking forward to any of your comments.

Martin Jan Junek