Ireland's Artist Statement

   Starting this year out, I had little hope that I would enjoy the photography class. I honestly had just signed up for it because I needed a year long class to fill one of my blocks. I had never really had any interest in taking photos other than when I would see pretty flowers or the sun looked good during the night a few times. I had never really owned a high tech camera, or honestly any camera at all. I would always just use my phone. After the 2nd semester started, I had suddenly begin enjoying this class because I had actually gone out and got myself a nice DSLR to take pictures that I would be proud of and want to keep and print out. Throughout the year, I had some favorite assignments, and some not so enjoyable assignments. Two assignments throughout this year that I enjoyed the most had to be these last two. Those are the Portrait assignment, where I had to take pictures of others and myself and really show who they were as a person, and the Nature assignment, where you can assume that it was taking good pretty pictures of things that are naturally around us every day. For both of these assignments, I worked with people and threw ideas back and forth of what we should do for every photo; the angle, the sun position, what height to take it, ect. For every assignment, I used another person because it's better for me to think that way. I think the reason that I liked that assignments closer to the end of the year the best is because we had a lot more freedom on what we could do and could plan out how to do it.

 
  In my sophomore year, I had my fair share of good and bad photos and assignments. One of my not so good photo shoots had to have been the Noun assignment. The assignment was to jumble two nouns and try to make them work together, then take 30 pictures incorporating them together. My two nouns that I decided to do were unusual and beauty. My thinking was that I would take pictures of things that weren't thought of to be pretty or beautiful but when you get close to it and take a better look, you could see how pretty they were. Now obviously that didn't work out considering I'm writing about how bad I was at that assignment. I think the reason it didn't work out so well is because the ideas juxtaposed each other too much. I had taken pictures of things like bugs, trees, and rocks. They ended up turning out nice looking, but they didn't match the theme of the actual assignment. One of my much better assignments was the nature photo shoots was the nature one. I enjoy taking pictures of things that occur in nature, and almost everything in nature can be beautiful if you look at it right. For my nature photos, my favorite had to be of the one with the flower on my wrist. We had to find something that had veins, yet couldn't use a flower. I was thinking and I realized, that, technically humans are a part of nature. In this photo, I really think that is showed my voice more than any other photos I've taken this year. It connects myself to nature and ended up looking very nice.

    Personally, I think my voice is like many other teenage girls these days. All teenage girls think that sunsets are pretty, flowers are cute, and animals are adorable. I think the only difference between my voice and all the other girls is that I think about the affect of things on photos. I took the photo of my cat in front of the mirror because I gives your more than a view of just one side of the photo. Like I've said before, a lot of my influences come from nature. I don't know why it fascinates me so much to be honest. I plan on going into the field of animal medicine, so the anatomy and the looks of animals always seem cool to me, and have since I was around 5. I want people to look at my art and say "Hey! That's cool!" and want to go take pictures of similar things.

 

    As the year has gone by, I have begun to realize what I'm decent at, great at, and just plain old suck at doing. Some of my strengths are being able to set up photos, lighting, and just getting the right angle. My weaknesses are probably just the basics. I'm not a fan of following the correct way to take "The perfect picture". I just kind of do whatever. And usually, I like how it turns out! I'm glad I took this course because it showed me that I actually have an interest in digital art.