My name is Anton, I currently live in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and work full-time for Abt Associates Inc., running the ZdravPlus public health reform project in Central Asia (former Soviet Union); my job is development and introduction of new management information systems.

So, I'm not a professional photographer, if "professional" is taken as "primary occupation". In English language the alternative for "professional" is "amateur", which sounds... well, doesn't sound right to me. In my native Russian a non-professional photographer would usually be referred to by a word, directly derived from "love"; thus, it's "the one who loves" rather than "the one who doesn't score much". Photography is an art, a means of expressing and sharing thoughts, emotions and mood, and I hope you'll agree that it better belongs to love and passion domain, rather than to the sphere of pure technical professionalism. This is where I fit in, trying to share the beauties that I see around and that decorate my life, to share what seems interesting or important, so other could benefit from it as  much as I did; these things do not entirely belong to or made by me, after all, I've just aimed the camera and pushed the shutter button.

People were and are always trying to decorate their surroundings. The reason for this, at least one of them, lies in the inherited primal knowledge that what we see is very important to us. Every day, through the whole day there is something in front of our eyes. We look and see, sometimes we look, but don't see; we pay attention to something, while not noticing something else. Everything we see affects us in some way; our thoughts, our mood, our emotions are heavily dependent on what we see, and things that we do not really notice are even more influential quite often, than those attracting our attention.

Our daily life leaves us limited opportunities to see nice things, nature in its infinite beauty, places all around the world, each sparkling with it's unique unparalleled features of culture, people's lifestyle, architecture, crafts, you name it. Our businesses do constantly test the limits of our abilities, and ever so often even a small emotional aid like a nice picture or a painting on the wall could give us that small boost that would carry us over the peak of a problem. There is an oriental tradition of Feng Shui, a practice of organizing everything around you in a way that would best suite your energies, your carma... whatever it is. Still, you may start with something less radical, but still visible and notable, like decorating that empty wall in front of your desk, how about that?