Hello,

My name is Jessica. I prefer photographs, not words. However, this is a blog for my English 112 class, so I’m required to write. When I learned I was going to have to create a blog, I almost immediately grabbed a course catalog to find an alternate class. Writing is not a strong suit of mine and honestly, sharing my writings with other people makes me nervous. As I looked through blogs online, I realized you could really make a blog about anything. That’s when I realized I may be getting worried for no reason. I noticed a lot of the blogs people created were family oriented or about a particular hobby or interest. Cooking, writing, sports, fashion, traveling, and then I came across photography.

I’m taking a photography course this semester and I thought if I could incorporate my work that I create in the next few months, maybe this blogging thing wouldn’t be so bad after all. So that is what I am going to attempt to do. Share my photographs (and some sort of writings about each photograph) with you.

Photography is one of my favorite activities, especially black and white film photography. I took photography classes for two years in high school and I’ve continued it outside of school as well. It was required to use manual 35 mm SLR cameras, so we were able to learn how to develop our film and then create prints in the dark room. It’s so much fun, taking pictures of interesting and different things, creating some kind of appealing photograph using light, angles, shadows, objects, people, just anything. And then working with the negatives in the dark room using different developing techniques to make the picture your own and how you envisioned it from the beginning.

For me, it’s a really gratifying hobby. I love trying new things or trying to improve older work or even trying to create something similar to a photo I’ve seen before, but use my own twist. The possibilities are endless and that’s something that I really love about it. You could have the same picture, but you could make them appear totally different. You could have two completely unrelated subjects, but develop them in a way that makes them have some sort of connection. You could photograph something to make a statement or you could create it just to have an entertaining picture.

The ideas are infinite and really, the hardest part is deciding what you want to photograph first...