My Nature Photo Art

How it All Began.......

My Nature

I am Ramona and I grew up in a small town in Saxony-East Germany, the communism part of Germany. When the Berlin wall came down I was 14 years old. When I was a child I remember, that I spent most of the time rather outdoors in the mud and dirt in the bushes behind the house, playing mainly with boys. We were playing soccer or we were pretending to be cowboys....or we spent time in the sandbox pretending this was our spaceship.

I didn't have a Barbie doll. Barbie dolls to this time didn't exist in the eastern part of Germany or were only able to obtain, if you had relationships to West Germany. So I had to take what was given.

I often was wearing used clothes (pullovers) from my cousin boys that have been of course mainly boy-like, unless I got some clothes from the elderly lady in the first floor of the house where we lived in, which were from her female relatives in West-Germany, in exchange for some of my parents garden herbs or vegetables from our garden that was a 10 minutes walk away. I did not have my own room until I was 13 years old.

My childhood vacations I spent with my grandparents (mom's parents) in the village, where they lived in a house with a German shepherd dog and my grandfather used to make me a bow and some arrows with his pocket knife and I would go down to the nearby creek and play in the bushes or I was chasing unsuccessfully my grandparents chickens in their backyard.

I also spent some time with my other grandparents (dad's parents) and played outside in the garden with the children, that lived there and I spent time in the private garden of my grandparents, where I was snacking on the cherries from their cherry trees. I was actually into nature since my earliest childhood.

Photo

When I first started taking pictures, it was just about anything that came along. I had no idea, what photography really meant.
I took images at birthday parties of people, cakes, flowers, at trips of landscapes, buildings, and people. It was just fun for me to create something that I would be sharing later with family and friends, a memory that would last to be remembered.
Oftentimes I was very disappointed when I discovered, that the images I had taken, have been often blurry, to bright, or cut out some details, i.e. a person was not fully in the image. My first images I have taken with an old-fashioned East German Camera and with a black- and white-Film. The digital era had not arrived at that time.

It took me a long time to learn about photography and I'm still learning. It's not about the camera gear you have or how big your lens is. The person behind a camera is what contributes the most to creating a stunning image.

When I switched from analog to digital photography, I still didn't realize what photography was all about, until I looked at my first thousands of photographs and I asked some pro photographers how my former website and images looked like to them. Disappointed again, getting the answer, that some of my images were to bright. I still didn't get it what they meant! For me the images have been great because I had seen this animal the way it was in it's environment. I started to practice more often and I did research on my subjects. I also learned that photography starts with good preparation. How will the weather be like? What other equipment do I need? (i.e. good boots)....Will I be there on time for sunset/sunrise? At what time does the sun set /rise? etc. etc. Basically thinking ahead!

Art

My Grandfather (dad's father) played a big role in my life. He actually introduced me to Art for the very first time, when I was a child.
My grandfather's background comes from an aristocratic family. He started his apprenticeship working for the German government in the town council, in the city hall as a financial accountant, and became later the town council secretary. After he came back from his army duties after World War II, he was placed as a bank manager working for a German bank branch known as Sparkasse. He also was given the title of an established official for a lifetime.

In his spare time, alongside his job as a banker, my grandfather used to organize traveling to the theatre and he worked freelance as a tour guide for coach bus travellers. He used to take my grandmother to most of the theatre events and for some time myself as well. We would go together to Art Exhibitions and one theatre visit, I remember very well, was to "Aladin and the magic carpet".

My grandfather was also the one, who taught me some words in foreign languages. We started to count to ten in Russian language, for instance, when I just started going to school.

My interest in photographic art was growing bigger, when I learned about some famous wildlife and landscape photographers. I entered several international photography competitions and suddenly I noticed one photo entry that won me an honorable mention was moved from "nature - landscapes" to "fineart - landscapes" by the judges or organizers of that one competion. That made me think "Wow, I actually can create art!"

My Website

My first Website I built in 2013 with the templates and tools of Website X5. It was for me a learning process since I have never done anything like this, but always wanted to have my own website.

My longing for creating my own website started way earlier then 2013. I started posting my photographs on Facebook and some of my friends suggested, I should maybe look into making my own website. And yes, I liked this idea very much.

I have been to Canada before and had some film analog photos that looked good. I took them with my analog Canon EOS 3000 camera, which I had purchased when I was 25 years old. In 2011 I bought my first Canon digital camera.

In 2012, I went to South Africa for the first time with my new digital camera and not all photos have been great. When I photographed elephants and lions in nature (not a zoo), I was thinking again about having my own website. I had admired to this time the work of Michael Poliza and Frans Lanting.

Your website is your business card. It is not just about to build a nice looking template or working on it. There is a lot of more work involved.

The header and footer of a website, how do you want them to look like? You want to personalize your website like your own fingerprint. It was not just about adding photographs to it. Which font of letters do you want to use? How many pages should be involved? Do you want to make room for a blog? All these questions went through my mind. There is really a lot to consider. Once the website is built you need a website domain name and a website hoster, where you upload your website to the internet.

This is a screenshot of my first former website.

How was "My Nature Photo Art" created?

Actually, a friend from California in the USA helped me to create "My Nature Photo Art".

We were chatting online and I told him that my former website had been shut down, since I left Germany and the website hoster was based in Germany. He suggested to look for a hoster that suits my needs and offered me to build my new website. But I wanted to be in charge and do it on my own, since I knew what I wanted my new website to look like. It should be more modern than the old one.

So he came up with some names like "my beautiful pictures". And I thought "hm....I do like nature and wanted to have something with nature in my new website's name, but also something with photography." Since it is a photography website and I am into nature, it is my way to showcase my nature photographs, that I have taken and they should look like my work, like my own art.

Finally the name My Nature Photo Art was created.

Now we both checked if the domain was still available to buy and it was. I purchased the domain name. Several months later I created this new website from scratch, again with some pre-template installed via the website creating tools from Website X5.

I hope you like what you see and discover on my new website.

Enjoy & Thanks for visiting!

Ramona @ My Nature Photo Art

Have any questions?