My family and I had just moved back from a 3.5-year stay in Singapore to Pennsylvania; I was seven years old. We were looking over pictures we took from our many travels, from countries including China, Japan, Thailand, Australia, etc., just to remember and reflect on our time there. At the time, I knew there was an object that could take a snapshot of a moment so that you could look back at in the future, but I knew not much of how it all actually worked. That's when I was handed a camera for the very first time.
I held it in awe. It resembled a sleek black rectangular prism, about the length of a chocolate bar but a bit thicker. On one side I saw my reflection smiling back at me on a screen and on the other a simplistic yet complex combination of plastic and metal. A shutter slid open softly, revealing an experienced lens superior to the naked eye. With the push of a button, I held electric technicolor in my bare hands. It was the most beautiful object I had ever held. This was my first exposure to the world of photography and videography and would lead to years of practice and development of my skills.
When I was thirteen, I was gifted a GoPro Hero 3 for Christmas, which was the very first camera I could call my own. Luckily for me, my family was headed on vacation to Jamaica a few days after I got it, and I decided I wanted to make a travel video of our time there. Of course, I had no prior knowledge or experience of videography. I had just watched travel videos online and thought to myself: "Hey, I can make that too."
I knew it was atrocious when my parents struggled to sit through it. All of the clips were shaky and not of anything interesting, the background music didn't fit the song, and there wasn't really a storyline throughout; I had just thrown in random clips wherever I thought they looked good. But, hey, that was my first video, and practice makes perfect, right?
By the age of seventeen, I had practiced videography for four years. I was a lot better now than when I first started, the technical aspects were enhanced; clips were much more stabilized, were more cinematically pleasing, and I knew how to edit picture/video quality to make everything look better. But it wasn't until the middle of my senior year of high school that videography really took off for me.
I started to post the videos I had created on social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, and soon more and more people started to interact with me and my photos/videos. I started to put forth more time and effort into it, I even saved up enough money to buy my very own drone to film aerial footage with. And, that brings me to where I am now, continually creating photo and video content to share with and engage my audience.
