Explaining My Hobby to an Alien
If you would have to explain your hobby to an alien, how would you do it?
~ @anomadsoul, in this post
How to explain this hobby to you, dear Mr. Alien.
I really thought about this. But it's impossible. I mean, it just DOESN'T make sense... The world keeps spinning around and around, and everything constantly changes, molecules and all. Things die and are born, transform and wither away. And then I come in, with a huge black tool.
I walk around and whenever I feel like it, I take the black tool and put it to my face and I close one eye and with the other eye I look through a tiny hole in the black tool. And I move my arms so that the black tool moves as well, so I keep seeing different things through the black tool. I sometimes also walk while looking through the hole in the black tool but that is not recommended as it is possible to fall down like that.
So then I make little sounds by pushing on a little button with the my right hand index finger. I decide how often I make the sound, and when. Sometimes I make many sounds, sometimes only a few. After I feel I have made enough of those sounds, I go home, and sit on a chair and take a little disc I remove from the black tool and I insert it into a larger tool that stands on top of a piece of wood that somehow doesn't fall down (because it's supported by four pieces of wood... but how far does this explanation need to go?! Mr. Alien, do you know about gravity and all that??!!)
Well, I have to punch buttons on this large stationary tool called a computer and then I can see things on a screen that I have just seen in real life. Only this time they stand still and they are cut out of the whole. So they are not really real anymore.
But when I look at these images on my screen, I will think they are nice or beautiful or rubbish, and I order them and I decide which ones are good and which ones are not. And then I think of people who would also like those images and perhaps I will make sure those other human beings watch the picture of what I have just seen in reality, and they will also decide whether they like them or not and whether they will comment on them or not.
And that is my hobby. It's called photography.
And dear Alien, here is an example of a picture I took today. I went to a small bird-zoo and the birds were all very friendly (except two, but they didn't get to have their picture taken). I did take many pictures actually, but I don't want to scare you too much. I know it is a lot to take in. And as they say, a picture says more than a thousand words, well, this post is about thousand words, and adding many pictures would make it even much much longer. So I'm limiting myself, even though I feel a very large and strong drive to want to share more pictures with you.
I have decided to share with you a picture of a sea eagle, because it is most fitting for our discussion here, about my hobby called photography. Photography is not something that is taken too serious by most people, although I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me about this. But I have the feeling this picture shows exactly how I feel about my hobby, and also how you, dear Mr. Alien, must feel about my description of it.
Please enjoy the picture, Mr. Alien. And if you have a steem account, Mr. Alien, please don't forget to upvote me.
Some clarification: What is a hobby anyway?
Ok, Mr. Alien. I lied. This is not really about my hobby. This is what I would like to be my hobby, and I try for it to be my hobby. But I'm bad at hobbies. I either make them full-time things incorporated in my life (like: philosophy, meditation, baking pies) or I epic-ally fail at them even though I continue trying them.
Photography is a hobby in that second category. I'm trying, really trying to get more experience. Even though I like doing it, I simply don't take it serious enough to really go out specifically to take photographs. Maybe I should, or maybe that is what hobbies are all about, things you would like to take seriously but you actually in all honestly don't. Do you have hobbies where you are from, Mr. Alien? Do you also find excuses for why you don't do your hobby more often? I often just 'forget' to bring my camera along, or I decide not to take it with me (it's heavy, you know) or I simply don't actually do anything but just sit behind my computer and write stuff. Which is not bad, actually, I get things done that way. A lot of things, but not my hobby.
My camera
So yeah, I really like taking pictures. And it's not all my fault, Mr. Alien. My sister @jeannedb is actually a photographer, and that makes that I both learned a lot about photography because of her, but also that I feel like my pictures will never be good enough, because it's just... a hobby. Still, she did make me get a very good lens and I mostly like playing with that one. I have a Nikon D3200 body (and I had to get my camera and check the bottom to remember that - which shows just how serous I am about this whole hobby of mine).
My favorite lens is a 70-300mm one. Perhaps I should try to explain to you why this is the case. But I don't actually know anything about it, except that it makes very pretty pictures with a lot of zoom, but you need to stand at a good distance if you want to get a good image. It also makes it easy to photograph a sea eagle, as long as he stays in one spot. In the picture I showed you, Mr. Alien, I was standing about 5 meters away from him, but there was a huge fence between us. But because of this specific lens, the fence is hardly even noticeable. That's how awesome this lens is.
