Flickr Creative Showcase

Close-Up Katarina Stefanović

Hometown: Belgrade, Serbia

Camera: Nikon F80 (Nikon N80 in U.S.)

Flickr member since: 2007

Flickr page:flickr.com/photos/jup3nep

An engineer by day, Katarina Stefanović was seduced by photography's charms when she spruced up her family home with prints of her travel pictures. "I discovered through visitors' reactions that the photos could be more than decorations on a wall," says Stefanović. "So I got myself busy and made a portfolio." She showed the portfolio to photographer friends, who encouraged her to exhibit the work. But she needed more "affrmation," so Stefanović joined Flickr. And she soon took on a major photographic project: permanently installing her prints in a hospital in her native Belgrade. "I had to gather as much courage as I could to do it," she says.

Stefanović's photographs seem the perfect remedy for a hospital environment. Their intense color and extraordinary landforms transport the viewer to a dreamy, beautiful place. "I want the viewer to go into that world and explore, to feel that he or she is on the spot where the picture was taken," she says. In fact, that world is often quite close to home, with many of her photographs made in the nearby Pannonian Plain. "You could live your whole life within a 50-kilometer ring around Belgrade and always find landscapes worth photographing," she says.

Unlike most of her fellow Flickr-ites, Stefanović still shoots film, though she scans it and uses image editing tools to manipulate shapes and colors. "I remain faithful to my old 35mm SLR," she says. And film's more-deliberative demands seem suited to her attitude about photography. "I take pictures when I feel like it," she says, "out of pure pleasure." AP