Before starting university, I never had much of an interest in photography. Even though I was exposed to it through my dad (being a property photographer by trade), I never really considered it could be a hobby.
That all changed at university.
My good friend and housemate Eesa bought a second-hand camera a couple of years ago, to snap some pictures whilst he was on holiday.
Thankfully, he let me borrow it as I wanted to try out taking pictures of bakes we had made.
My first picture was of some chocolate oat bars we had sitting around - mostly as a practice shot so I could get used to the camera. I was amazed at the detail captured and shallow depth of field that could not be captured using my smartphone.
In the past, I have used Unsplash as a quality source of copyright free images, so decided to give back to the community and upload this image on there, so that others could use it.
Unsplash receive thousands of high-quality photos every single day, and I did not expect anyone to be interested in my first ever photo with a DSLR.
A couple of months pass by and I decide to check on the statistics of my photo uploads on Unsplash.
I was shocked to see that this photo had received over 250 downloads and 220,000 views since uploading the image.
Looking over my stats for the last 30 days, I noticed a huge spike of views in late December, so I assumed that it must have been used on another website.
Doing a quick reverse image search on Google, I found that my first photo (with a proper camera) had been featured on a BuzzFeed article.
I couldn't believe that my picture was good enough for a site like BuzzFeed to use.
This gave me a huge boost to pursue my interest in photograpy further, and I have since got a camera of my own to use, where I plan on freely sharing more images soon.
My most recent photo is of some coffee beans, and I love how it turned out.
If you would like to keep up to date with my latest photos, take a look at my Unsplash profile.