Ever since I was a child I always had a love and a passion for art and music….. At 5 years old I would be standing on my living room table screaming “I’m going to be the next American Idol!” as the show played in the background and my family surrounding. For whatever reason it may be I always felt a sense of enjoyment for music which still has not died out. When I was first born the nurses told my parents “that baby will be a star one day” (obviously not literally, but I was the loudest screaming baby in the bunch). Growing up I would constantly be humming or singing something, whatever it may be, and that still has not stopped. I even at one point played the violin and piano for a few years, but I eventually stopped. I am hoping to eventually take up piano again and to learn to play the guitar. Music is a therapy, to me, and to many other people… it’s a way to distract your mind from everything else in the world and to just purely enjoy the tunes and lyrics of whatever is being played.
I believe it was in middle school I found my interest in photography.. I hadn’t really gotten invested in the art of it yet, but the urge to learn and perform it definitely was present. When I got my first Ipod touch was probably when I actually realized it. That being the first device I had to take an endless amount of photos of anything and everything. Eventually I upgraded to an actual smartphone/iphone where the quality was immensely better than what I previously owned, and following not to long afterwards I desperately wanted an expensive, high-end digital camera. My excuse? Take an AP Digital Photography class so my mom was forced to help me buy a camera (considering it was necessary for the class). Here I found my passion for taking photos and portraits, with my Canon rebel T5; my teacher still to this day has a folder specifically for my work to show her classes as examples. I began to take some senior pictures and all that jazz, and seeing the happiness and confidence people obtain from the photos gives me a sense of blissfulness. Taking photos became another kind of therapy for me, as music also does.
My senior year of high school I found my love for not only digital photography, but also for darkroom photography. Darkroom being much, much different than digital photography…requiring chemicals, developing, timing, certain lighting, etc. This type of photography requires film where you only get about 24 or so shots in each roll of film. In order to develop the film you must develop in the absolute pitch black… certain chemicals for a certain timing, with certain movements and certain steps. All of these steps and rules required you to be consistently attentive; it requires a lot of thought. But all of these steps and all of this strenuous thinking gives you an extreme sense of achievement and confidence when your work comes out just right. Having possession of a physical printed photograph was completely awesome.
Printing is a completely different process than developing; developing being the act of developing the film and having the photos physically appear on the film strip, and printing being the act of physically printing the photo onto a piece of photo paper. This required the use of light, unlike developing which requires pitch black at all times. Printing was strictly about the light and shadows reflecting onto the sheet of paper. The longer the paper is exposed, the darker the photo will be; the less times the paper is exposed to the light, the lighter the photo will be. This meant you need it to be exposed for just the right amount of time, maybe even using certain filters so the photo appears just right. After this step you must keep the photo paper submerged in certain chemicals, for just the right time, with just the right motions such as rocking the tray of chemicals back and forth. This will most likely come up again with a much more detailed description to create a physical mental picture later in my other essays.
Anyways, this process and hard work, then physically seeing the outcome always made me feel super proud of myself. I even have a lot of my work attached to the walls in my bedroom, all the photos being in black and white and having their own unique style. When it comes to photography it’s all about perspective and putting thought into the shot that you are taking. Yet all of the work and thought does not feel like work at all….. it makes me enjoy the process even more.
I am now, my freshman year in college at BCC, taking up a darkroom photography class and hopefully in the near future another digital photography class. I have an enormous passion for photography and for music. I hope to learn even more than I already have and to be open to all of the possibilities it may bring my way.
For the most part, I thought your rough draft was well written. I learned more about you as your person and what you’re passionate about, and I thought that was really cool. In the second and third paragraphs, when you transitioned from talking about how you got interested in photography to how different processes of photography worked flowed well. To be honest, I didn’t really think photography was hard, until you described how darkroom photography worked and how strenuous it was, it made me stressed out just thinking about. It must’ve been really hard, but practice makes perfect. For some reason, I could envision going through each process of photography because that’s how detailed it was. I can tell that you’re really passionate about photography, however, you could elaborate more on your interest in music, because I feel like that didn’t get enough recognition in the rough draft. Maybe you should talk about if you’re ever tried writing any songs, tried auditioning for American Idol, if there were any songs that got stuck in your head because you loved them that much, anything of that sort.
Art seems to work well as a theme for you, with a variety of art-related interests to draw from. In a short essay, I’d suggest focusing (no pun intended) on just one art form, and you seem to have quite a bit more to say about photography than music. Some of what you write about here, though, reads more like an informational essay about how developing and printing work rather than the more personal approach I’d expect in a memoir.
As you revise, I’ve got a couple main suggestions:
–I’d encourage you to focus more specifically on a particular experience of shooting (and maybe developing and printing as well) some photos. Think in terms of scenes (bringing reader into your experience at a particular place and time. What are the pleasures and satisfactions of the various parts of the process? Show, don’t just tell.
–The other thing I’d suggest thinking about is what your main message is. It should be more than just I like photography. Think about what it has taught you, or revealed to you, or how it has shaped the way you see the world. You might want to bring us into the photographer.s mind and eye in some way. Consider how a reader might connect to what you write about, how it might be relevant to the lives of others who may not be photographers (though most of us *are* photographers these days, at least on our phones).
In terms of the mechanics of the writing itself, this is skillfully done, with good control of sentence structure and punctuation.