When I was sixteen, before Instagram became the de facto platform for photography, a few of my friends and I found ourselves enamoured with Flickr.
I was entranced by this one photographer on the platform. He didn't shoot conventionally beautiful landscapes or anything. He just had this way of capturing people: as though he was somehow getting at their purest essence.
I always strove to capture the feeling he managed to with his photos. With some of my other photography crushes, I tried to emulate their style. But with this person, his photos eschewed any discernible style. They cut straight to the bone, to the core.
Many years later, after I'd forgotten about my love affair with photography, I found myself in working in tech as a software engineer.
During one of my internships, I joined a tiny twenty person company in San Francisco. And on my first day, I was amazed to learn that the photographer from Flickr worked there as a designer.
He sat three feet behind me, and over the next eight months, I had the pleasure of working closely with him on several occasions.
One day, not too long after I'd joined the company, we fell into conversation about photography. I didn't have a camera then, and when he learned this, he mentioned that he had an old camera he'd been meaning to sell.
He let me have it for next to nothing, this old Fujifilm digital camera from the 2000s. And when I started using it, I couldn't stop marvelling at the fact that all those years ago in high school, I had likely been looking at photos he'd shot with it.
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