I'm planning to see Europe for the first time in May. I'll be travelling with Babe. We'll probably only have time to visit just two maybe three countries. Italy and France are top priority.

I know so little about Europe. Though the trip is more than a half a year away, I've started looking online for info to help me come up with a rough itinerary. I need to do this now, this early. I need something to look forward to.

Lately, I've been viewing the world through other people's pictures that they post online, on websites such as flickr. I'm often as intrigued with the people who photograph and create the pictures as I am with the pictures. I imagine what these photographers' lives are like... especially what it must be like to see beauty in so many more things, to capture it, and to create such beauty from the things the rest of us perceive as ordinary. I so envy them. We live in a beautiful world... but apprently, it is more beautiful for some than for others.

I noticed that a number of people take and post pictures of themselves. At first, they seemed vain and vainglorious to me. But after seeing quite a few itneresting self-portraits, and after having an interesting experience with my pictures last month, my feelings about self-portraiture changed. It seems less egotistic and more like a kind of metaphysical exercise, a notch deeper and possibly even more fulfilling than self-exploration through other's pictures. You are both the photographer and the photographee. (Hm... there's something almost erotic about that.)

So now I have two immediate reasons to learn photography. First, to be able to extract more beauty out of the world for myself (and I'd like to be able to do much of that while in Europe). Secondly, to be able to photograph myself as a means of leaving my mark on the world and on my own soul. I would try to get good at photography, and would buy myself an expensive digital camera, if but to do the latter.