The Beginning: Part 2

Before actually beginning my-eternity of a 19 hour drive to the sunshine state- Journey, I realized that I needed to capture this 5 month experience with some pictures! So while I was working as a lifeguard the summer before I left, I began saving my money towards a new camera.


Now my history with camera is very small.... my first camera was an Olympus digital compact camera my parents had gotten me for Christmas, I wasn't exactly too excited at first because it wasn't something I really requested but the fact that I got something was good enough :) it actually happened to have worked out nicely because a couple summers later I went to Italy on an exchange program and needed a camera. Now when it comes to photography and first starting out, I just played around with that camera and never really thought anything of it, but I always loved pictures that were different, not your typical pose in front of a camera, group shot. the only thing I thought of was illusions to the eye that were just different.

But I ended up falling into the "Group Shot Slump" where we all new our pictures were being taken and we all posed..... Boring... BUT these were from Italy :)

         
Although my trip was amazing and loved every minute of my time there, I ended up coming home with a broken camera, because I had taken mine to the beach and sand had made its way inside.... long story short it wasn't working....

with that that being said, I told myself I needed something more durable, bigger, better quality, and not too expensive. So I end up finding an Olympus 10 mega pixel Digital SLR Camera which was right around where my budget was. I knew nothing about cameras except for the Naive mistake of thinking that the more mega pixels you have the better quality the pictures you have, so that's pretty much the only thing I looked at along with the price of the camera. The fact that this camera was my first SLR was a huge step for me though, I felt like the paparazzi with this huge camera and huge lens, which isn't as big as I thought it was when I look at pro equipment today, but I was happy that I had a camera where I could take tons of pictures!

I was practicing as much I could with that camera taking pictures whenever I wasn't working, and I ended up getting cool pictures where the back ground was all blurry, little did I know I was referring to the "Bokeh" and following the "rule of thirds". These words meant nothing to me at the time because I didn't know about them, all I knew is what pictures looked good, and which ones didn't. When I look back, I question myself if I had a natural eye for what looked good?

Finally after a couple weeks of practicing, the day arrived, and me and my dad left to begin my journey to Florida and start the Program that changed my life.