User:Photograph R
My Aunt Ellen won an amateur photography contest when I was a young girl. I don't remember the photo she took, but I remember the prize. It was a ride in a large commercial airplane over our local San Francisco Bay Area in California. My grandmother and same-aged cousins (Ellen's daughters) all went to the Airport to send her upward to claim her prize. In the 1950's, we all dressed up and wore our best clothes to the airport...it was not a casual event. It was a formal occasion. As it turned out, there were extra seats on the plane, and all of us who were so nicely dressed were invited onboard to take a ride! What a thrill! It was the first time any of us had ever been to an airport and on a plane!
This singular, spectacular experience shaped my life in so many ways! I learned that there is value in photography and taking photos for the love of it. I yearned to be like my Aunt who carried her camera in a knapsack and took photos of landscapes, birds, wildlife and family. Conceived on that day was a desire to fly and see with a bird's eye view our Earth from every angle. I begged my parents for a camera for my next birthday. Of course it was a point-and-shoot film camera that had no settings. Film and processing were expensive. The shutter was parsimoniously "clicked", the hidden photo remained inside the camera until the whole roll of film was used, and the batch-processed results were generally disappointing. Nevertheless, my enthusiasm did not suffer, and I was determined to get better.
As a UC Berkeley student years later, I majored in Journalism with an emphasis in photojournalism. I loved the ability to process my own black and white film, but I disliked having deadlines and assignments, so I chose education over a newsroom. With a MS in Curriculum Development and Administrative Leadership, I have used my skills to take photos of just about everything on every continent in the world and of everybody (much to the annoyance of my family) purely for the joy of it, and for educational purposes, training others, and sharing photos with friends, family, schools, non-profits, and my own travel blog. I look forward to sharing my photos on the Commons platform.