Morocco, time of my first steps with professional photographers

Magical encounters thanks to the photography

I’ve been in many countries around the world and I’ve seen beautiful things in each of them! But Morocco… it remains my best souvenirs for so many reasons! First of all, I attended my first photography festival there, in Oujda in May 2009.

I met there some of the best photographers I’ve ever met: my dear great friend Saeed Al Shamsi who invited me later in 2013 to join the UPI (United Photographers International) but also my mentor Simon Wheatley who was at this time photographer at the Magnum Agency.

Simon taught me so many things in only 4 days about the light, the composition, why a good photographer needs to be one with his camera to take great picture and why a good camera will always be a manual one!

But nowadays Many photographers (or so-called...) rely entirely on the micro chips inside their camera!

More geeks than photographers

They don’t speak anymore about lights, composition, depth of field, aperture and speed but only number of mega pixels, ISOs, size of sensors and so many useless and only geek topics… and they can take more than 2 000 pictures a day!

These people are geeks, they’re not photographers!!

If you meet one day someone who ask you how many megapixels owns your camera, he’s definitely not a photographer! Just keep in mind that the camera is only 5% of the final result! The most important is, by far, your eyes and your lens!! Not the body! Forget the technical information of your camera, the only requirement a photographers expects from his camera is its ergonomics! Everything else is only… bullshit….

You recognize these geeks very easily hopefully… they carry on with them a huge camera with an even more huge lens, a very good one but that weighs more than 2kg. They often wear a shirt with an inscription related to their favorite brand (most of the time Canon or Nikon). And each time they see something, they need to take it in photo!

A wonderful virus!

Well, this festival in Morocco was the first one of so many festivals after this one!

It was my first encounter with other photographers and I was like a kid, happy to see so many new things and to talk to all these professionals! This country gave me the virus of the travel, of encountering new people and new cultures!

I love Morocco, and I will love this country for ever!