Weekly Blog Post 7

As someone who is obsessed with keeping memories and mementos of both important and seemingly-unimportant parts of my life, photography is something I greatly appreciate and have used for this purpose. However, my interest (although not my experience or type of knowledge) extends beyond this into photography of nature and things around us as a form of capturing feelings and messages. As a young child, picture books with illustrations were not as interesting to me as ones with photographs. For my eleventh birthday I was given my first camera that was all my own, and I used up rolls of film like they were growing in my backyard.

Over the past four or so years, I haven’t taken as many pictures of everyday things or friends in high school as I wanted to and wish I would have but I have always taken rolls upon rolls, eventually memory cards upon memory cards, of pictures when I go on vacation. At some point, my dream was to be a professional photographer but that was lost along with many others for no apparent reason and I have not even tried to learn more about photography.

However, if someone came to my door right now and said they would train me as a photographer for National Geographic I would say yes in heartbeat. I was given a subscription to the magazine about two years ago and renewed it myself because I loved it, most of all because of the photography and that they are parts and things in the world that not many people get to see and that I am dying to see.

For the purpose that we will be looking at photographs for, I am excited to look at photographs analytically. In previous English classes, we’ve touched on the influence of rhetorical strategies in photography but never looked at it as its own aspect of communication because they were all literature and strictly writing composition classes. I look forward to learning how photographers use their craft to get their message so I can better appreciate what I am looking at because of what somebody else thought that what they were looking at was significant.