What a Pandemic Camera Turned Into

Learning by Trial and Error

When I first picked up a camera during the pandemic, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't take a class. I didn't follow a structured course. I just kept shooting, kept messing things up, and slowly figured out what worked through trial and error.

Street photography came first. Then product shots. Then macro, which is how I ended up spending an embarrassing number of hours photographing betta fish through an aquarium lid. Somewhere along the way I started paying attention to things I used to ignore completely: composition, color balance, focal length, how light behaves depending on where it comes from and what it hits.

A Place to Disappear Into

None of this ever felt like studying. It felt more like a place to disappear into for a while. There's something about looking through a viewfinder that quiets everything else down. I wasn't trying to become anything. I just liked being behind the camera.

Photography also brought me into a community I didn't expect. I started meeting other people who cared about the same small details I did, the kind of people who'd spend twenty minutes discussing why one frame worked and another didn't.

Two Betta Fish Photography Competition Wins

In February and March 2021, a few of my betta fish photos ended up placing in national competitions. First place representing KFI DKI Jakarta in a competition that drew a record 607 entries, the highest in the community's online competition history. Then, a month later, first place in the Phone Camera category and second place in the Professional Camera category at a competition hosted by Highland Betta. None of it was a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was the first time strangers who actually knew what they were looking at, people who bred and photographed these fish seriously, told me my photos were good. That mattered more to me than it probably should have.

Moving Into Food Videography

More recently, I've been moving into videography. Editing in DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro, learning an entirely new set of skills on top of the ones I'd already built. I've been focused specifically on food content, both photo and video, and posting it on TikTok as Jimmy Leonardo @jimm.leonardo, mostly street food, since a big part of my savings goes there anyway. It's a different kind of storytelling. Photography is about a single frozen moment. Video is about pacing, motion, sound, how a shot leads into the next one. I'm still early in that part of the journey, but it's been a good kind of hard.

Looking back, I never planned any of this. I didn't buy that camera to become good at photography. I bought it because I was bored during a pandemic and curious about what my father-in-law's photos could do that mine couldn't. Everything after that, the community, the competitions, the food videos, the apps, all of it grew out of just showing up and shooting, over and over, until I started understanding what I was looking at.

That's usually how it goes with the things that end up mattering. You don't plan your way into them. You just keep doing the small thing you enjoy, long enough, until it turns into something bigger than you expected.