Introducing myself to the Steemit community

Hi everyone, my name is Colin, and I am a photographer. Not a professional photographer, more of the enthusiastic amateur photographer type. I have a pen name, or stage name, or whatever you would like to call it of Hans Franchesco. A name given to me by my God Daughter, which is in itself a story I may tell some time, but not today. People often ask me what kind of photography do I do, or what's my shooting style, and truthfully - I have no clue. I just take pictures of things that I find beautiful, interesting, amusing, and even sometimes a little scary (although those are few and far between). I live in the Pacific Northwest so many of my photographs contain rivers, streams, mountains or trees, but I do other things as well, such as the image here, which I called "Emotions" with a sub title of "Goodbye my darling". This came about as I was wandering around the local college one weekend looking to take some pictures of flowers as it was late spring. I just happened to stumble across the discard pile for the art students studying sculpture - I don't think they call it that any more, the sign on the door just said Art Department. Anyway, the discard area turned out to be a treasure trove of potential images and the flowers were completely forgotten for the rest of the afternoon. This image I thought was quite powerful; the look of sadness on the female head, the loving look on the male head as he whispers "I love you" in her ear and attempts a last gentle kiss to her hair before they are finally parted forever.... For me it was an image that just worked so well. After processing through Photoshop, it sat in my file for some time and then I entered it into a photographic competition which was titled Emotions (I figured it was a perfect fit), where it came almost last out of around a thousand entries, which explains why I am an amateur photographer and not a professional. But my point is, just like any artist, I capture images I like, I don't take pictures because I need the public at large to like them. Art is very subjective, and the artist should never consider if the audience will like and favor their work. It doesn't matter because we get our pleasure from creating the image, and that is all that is important.