Belated Happy Mother's Day!

For every aspiring photographer this is probably where it all starts: taking pictures of the people we hold most dear. Whenever I am in the Philippines my camera lens almost always ends up pointing at my mom, the person I love the most in the whole wide world!

You have to of course, excuse me. The photograph on the left is just point-and-shoot standard. This was probably taken with a Sony Cybershot P200, two or three years before my passion for photography had awaken. During this time my technical knowledge about photography was close to zero! I was familiar about these settings, but I never really knew how to put them in effect. So you can call this picture a portrait disaster: off centered, cropped miserably (was I really focusing on my mother or the cactus in the background, or the background itself?), and the composition is a total disaster!

But disaster or not, this picture still means a lot to me, much more than the beautiful pictures I have taken during my photo assignments to Sweden, or any other travel photograph. This is, after all, my mother! Nenita Malonzo, of Spanish and Philippine descent, where I got my good looks (ahem) from! And after my father passed away 3 years ago, my bond with my mother has become even stronger, if that were possible. She is the only parent I have left. And seeing her in this photograph, beautifully dressed in the Philippine national costume, makes my heart just swell with pride.

This is another motivation for getting better photographic equipment. The next time (hopefully this year) I travel back to the Philippines to visit my mother, I want to be able to take professional quality portraits of her, and the rest of the family. I want to take pictures with shallow DoF, beautiful bokehs, pictures which can be enlarged and hanged on walls. I don't have pictures of my family in my apartment in Oslo yet, and it's about time I did.

But Leica M9-P or not (not yet anyway), I will still visit my family and spend as much quality time as I can with them. I still do own a Pentax K-5, so if I have to go back to the Philippines without a Leica M9-P in tow, this camera will be just as up to the task. And I am sure the photographs will be just as beautiful and meaningful. After all, it's not really the camera that matters in the long run, but the pictures you take.

So to my mother, and to all mothers out there, a belated happy mother's day to you. And to all photographers out there who have been too busy making a living out of taking photographs and have not found the time to spend with their families: let us remember what got us to start taking photographs to begin with, and let us go back to our roots for even just a short while.

Do you have a picture of your mother that you are really proud of? Share them online and explain what makes this photograph meaningful.