Where it all began

You see that photo? Yes, that’s when I first started getting into photography. Back then, I thought this photo was just the bee’s knees. A cute little girl is the subject and it’s a close-up; boy was I wrong.

To the mother of this child this is a great candid photo of her daughter. But that’s all it will ever be. There is so much more to creating a great image, but we’ll get to that later.

When I got into photography I was a senior in high school. One of my electives was a photography class. Even though this was not my first photo class I was still excited about it. I had my mom’s Canon Rebel and felt invincible. I took this class to help improve my work and to figure out if I was really as good of a photographer as I thought I was. In the class we had assignments telling us what we should take photos of. One of the assignments was to capture winter in our town. The below photo was one of the images that I turned in for that assignment:

I honestly had no idea what I was doing at the time. Most of my images looked like the above one; they were close up with a shallow depth-of-field (DoF). Like I said before, there is so much more to creating a great image than just DoF. This class didn’t teach me a whole lot about creating imagery. It wasn’t until college that I actually learned how to take a good photograph.

Creating a great image wasn’t on my mind throughout the class until I got entered into a competition for some of my photos. I won first place for their “Long-term” project and second place for the onsite project. This was when I started to realize that I may have some potential for becoming a photographer.