Artist? Part 3

Here I am with the last part of these posts about my art. This is the most recent thing I've been doing. In fact, I've actually been doing it for less than a year. The thing that I'm talking about is photography.

I don't really put drawing and photography in the same category, which is partially why I didn't include it in my last post, about visual art. Drawing and painting is more centered around your own imagination whereas photography has more of a technical side, more taking what is already there and arranging it in some way to make it art. It's more of seeing what you want in your mind and just finding it in the world.

Then there's documentary photography. Where you...don't really visualize, but just...document.

I do quite a bit of both.

My interest in photography actually came about partially because of my brother, partially because of incoming college applications.

I'm not really sure which part of this story comes next. We'll just say I got it right. My brother would always take the family camera on our vacations and take really interesting pictures with it. He'd get shots from weird angles and stuff. Possibly because of that, Ne because of the college applications that I mentioned earlier and will expand on later, he took Photo 1 his senior year in high school. That class was all about black and white darkroom photography, I think with more of an emphasis on composing shots. For that class, you needed to record all the settings you used for the pictures when you shot, so I spent quite a bit of time helping my brother with that.

This is kinda when the second factor comes in.

One of the requirements for UCs is a year of fine or performing arts. Naturally, I wasn't about to randomly take up orchestra or something, so I (and my brother as well) decided to take up art. All the other types of art (painting, drawing) sounded hard, and photo sounded fun, so that's what I ended up choosing. Which clearly became the right choice.

I turned out to be good at photography. I'd listen to what the teacher was saying about composition and stuff, go out there with a fresh roll of film, and just kinda shoot "randomly". Obviously I was doing something right because my teacher loved the stuff I was producing. Eventually, that meant I could do half effort towards the end of the school year and she wouldn't care x3. Then again, there were a bunch of seniors who were taking the class to graduate/for college at the last minute and were a bunch of slackers.

I actually really enjoyed darkroom photography. Ok so the chemicals smelled weird and if you got it on your hands...well have fun smelling all funky...but I really enjoyed the laid out steps during processing of both the film and the paper.

Ok, taking the pictures were fun too ;P

Anyway, recently, my parents got me a dSLR camera. He has a name too. I asked CFM meece for ideas, and ended up choosing "Leo".

It fit <3

And that's where I'm at today. Any questions? Something specific you want me to write about next? Comment below! :D