Throughout my Computer Systems Engineering degree, most of the projects I have worked on have existed behind a screen. I have developed programs designed to solve everyday problems, learned how software can influence the success of a business, and understood that a developer is also responsible for protecting the security and reliability of the systems people depend on. Most of my skills naturally revolve around the digital world: software development, system updates, problem solving, and even small personal programs that I have started creating to make parts of my daily life easier.
Photography, on the other hand, has never really been part of my interests. I am not someone who takes many selfies, and when I get a new phone, the camera is usually one of the last specifications I look at. It has simply never been an important part of how I spend my time or express myself.
That is exactly why I chose Photos as my contribution area for WPCredits. I wanted this project to be something genuinely different from what I am used to doing. Choosing another technical area would have kept me inside a world I already know. Photography gives me the opportunity to step outside that comfort zone and experience a different kind of contribution.
Going outside with the intention of taking photographs felt strange at first, but that feeling became part of what made the project interesting. It pushed me away from my usual virtual environment, made me lift my head from a screen, and encouraged me to pay attention to the sky, the light, and the places around me in a way I had not done for a long time.
My project will focus on contributing original photographs to the WordPress Photo Directory. The goal is to create images that can be useful to other people in the WordPress community and make them available under the requirements established by the Photo Directory. I will also document the submission and review process, including the progress of the photographs I contribute throughout the program.
Even though photography is new to me, I think some of the habits I have developed through software projects can still help me. Working in technology has taught me to follow requirements carefully, pay attention to details, document my work, learn from feedback, and improve something after it does not work as expected. Those same habits can be useful when learning the guidelines of the Photo Directory and adapting my photographs to the standards of an open-source community.
I want to learn more about photography from a practical perspective: composition, lighting, framing, and what makes an image useful beyond simply looking good. I also want to understand how the WordPress Photos team reviews contributions, how open licensing works in this context, and what it means to contribute something creative to an open-source project instead of contributing code.
By the end of the project, I hope to have contributed a collection of original photographs to the WordPress Photo Directory and to feel more comfortable with a creative activity that was previously outside my usual interests. More importantly, I want to finish the experience with a broader idea of what contributing to open source can mean. Not every contribution has to be code, and sometimes learning something new begins simply by looking away from the screen and paying attention to what is already around you.
