Most of my friends would probably call me a “camera geek,” but this time last year, I absolutely hated photography.
Last year I enrolled in the college’s journalism program and little did I know, photography was a sizeable aspect of the curriculum. I begrudgingly spent a couple of hundred bucks on an entry level DSLR after the first week and unsurprisingly, that didn’t make me feel any better about the whole ordeal.
Photojournalism was just one class, and we all have that one class we hate so I decided to just suck it up for three hours a week. Although, I had to seriously question why I spent so much money on a stupid camera that worked just as well as the one in my cell phone.
Fast-forward to today and I’m the photo editor for this very newspaper for the second semester in a row.
I’m not going to lie. I had despised my camera for a solid month but then it all started to make sense. It started being fun. In retrospect, it would have been easy to call it a wash but I’m really glad I stuck with it.
I wanted to catch up to my classmates who were already exposed to photography. So I looked up as many tutorials as I could find to make sense of all these new terms and concepts like ISO, aperture, crop factor, bokeh, RAW. It was all gibberish to me. Now those are the kinds of things I have to explain to everyone else.
After photography started making sense I started to enjoy going to those classes and the hobby became a regular part of my day. If I’m not taking pictures you can usually find me getting into internet fights about brands or drooling over the latest and greatest glass on the market.
I’m still developing as a photographer and I am fully aware I’m no Ansel Adams or Robert Capa, but that’s okay. Regardless of what other people might think, I like my pictures and I’m excited to pull out my camera every day because I’ve seen how far I’ve come and how far I’ll go.