Hi and welcome, thank you so much for being here and reading my story!
My name is Monika. I was born and raised in Hungary in a beautiful city, called Szeged. We call it "Sun City" as the city enjoys the most of the sunny hours through the year. So, I love sun and hot weather đ
I moved to the UK and started my journey when I was 20.
My first memories about photography take me back to my childhood. I have a really bad memory but I do remember how me and my family used to go on holidays every year in the summer somewhere around Hungary and once we also went to Croatia.
Every time we went on vacation my mum would bring her camera which was normally packed up somewhere at home completely out of our reach.
I only saw it occasionally, mostly on the holidays or birthdays and we weren't really allowed to touch it even then. This camera was gifted to my mum originally from my grandad who sadly passed away when I was 7.
Unfortunately, I never met with my grandmas and we lost my second grandad when I was 12.
My mum loved and still loves photography and she looked after this camera as a treasure.
And I really wanted this treasure! It was so cool! And something I did not understand! My mum would just make us pose somewhere and she say "smile", then me and my brother were making funny faces and a couple of weeks after the holiday my mum would show us the printed images. And I was like "wow this is magic"! And me and my brother agreed how funny we looked and next time we will be funnier.
Then once we went on holiday my dad decided to buy a cheaper camera that we were allowed to use. Yes, he said it's for all of us and we can use it! I remember he pointed at one in the store and the salesman just put a film in rolled it and clicked, haha sounds easy doesn't it? My mums had so many settings to do before pressing the button and click. I believe this was the main reason why we weren't allowed to touch it đ ( âyou gonna press something on itâ )
So, I was sooo excited about the new camera and so ready for it. Finally, I was allowed to create and make magic!!!
My parents let me take this camera on school holidays and family vacations and also during summers, I used to kill the time with my friend, Szabrina taking photographs of each other. We took pictures while we playing dress up or going on an adventure. We even photographed our bunnies and the fun we had with them while walking them on a lead and treat them like little puppies. OMG we still laugh at those pictures when we pull them out from the albums. We used to save our pocket money to buy films, and after we took some photographs we went to get them printed. They turned out to be quite funny as we didn't have the option to delete if we did not like them. So, whatever we took a picture of just remained in the film. We always laughed when thinking what the people developing them in the darkroom would think when seeing those pictures.
Yes, these were one of our first selfies đ
Taking picture and making memories was definitely something I loved creating đ
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed my tiny story and my first blog how I felt about camera the very first time!
In my next blog I will tell the story about how I started professional photography đ
Best wishes until then
xx
Monika
Thank you