How it all began (a long, long time ago)

I can still remember my first camera. At the time I was 14 and lived with my parents in Bucharest. It was just after the 1989 Revolution that overthrew the communist regime that poisoned our country for almost half a century. The camera was a soviet-built FED-3 with a 60mm f/2.8 fixed lens (pictured here; photo credit: Keith Berry). It had no auto-focus, no auto-exposure, no anything you usually find most with cameras nowadays. So, in order to shoot with that camera, you had to have a minimum of photographic expertise.

I used the ORWO ASA100/DIN21, B/W 135mm East-German films. Not that I had a preference but they were cheap and easy to find. At that time in Romania, you could only dream of Kodak and other "capitalist" goodies.

And I did not stop there.

The bathroom became once in a while the "darkroom" where I developed my film (negatives). And soon I took another leap: the kitchen became the "photo lab" where I developed my photos on paper. I had three trays (developer, stop bath, fixer), a green lamp and an enlarger (East German). It was painfully slow and every time I developed photos I ended my "photo lab" session around 3-4 AM, completely exhausted. Usually, the next morning, my mom found the photos drying, stuck on the window or wherever I found a smooth surface.

And this passion lasted for a couple of years, through my high-school. It ended suddenly when I received my first automatic film camera. I was already a first year student and at that point my interests didn't leave any spare time for photography. So I gave up my earlier passion and became a vacation point-and-shoot-photographer.