Lauren's Art Discourse

When I graduate, I would like to be a wildlife photographer. I would love to work for a company such as National Geographic someday. I first started taking pictures when I was in elementary school and my parents gave me a simple film camera (Which I unfortunately broke when I dropped it on our driveway). The next camera I remember getting was a small point-and-shoot digital camera that my grandparents gave me for Christmas. With that camera, I remember going around and taking pictures of my family when we would get together for holidays, especially Christmas. I started getting into photography more seriously when I was in high school and was able to take classes on it. It was in my junior year of high school that I decided that I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. In my first photography class, I remember seeing photos by Ansel Adams and thinking that I wanted to travel to all different national parks and take photos like he had. But, as I have loved animals for basically as long as I can remember, I decided that I would want to focus mostly on taking pictures of animals. The first photography class was all film photography, but in the second class we started to get into digital photography. Once I learned how to use a more advanced digital camera, I remember borrowing my Dad’s camera and going outside many days to take pictures of whatever animals I could find around our yard (One day I actually ended up taking hundreds of pictures just of birds, which annoyed my Dad a little bit.) Before all of this, I had bounced around between different careers, all of which were centered around some sort of art or creative expression (fashion design, interior design, etc.) , but from those first two classes, I knew that what I really wanted to do was wildlife photography.