I first became interested in photography when I was a freshman at Fremd. I started taking photos for the Viking Logue, our school’s newspaper, and when my first photos were printed, I knew that photography was something I would be doing for the rest of my high school career. For my sophomore year, I applied to be the photography editor of my newspaper and I was hired for the position. I also enrolled in a digital photo class for my first semester to familiarize myself with Adobe Photoshop. My photo class was different from what I originally thought it would be like. Instead of just taking photos and printing them like I did for the newspaper, I edited them and put them together in different ways – something I was prohibited from doing for the newspaper. It was nice to be able to do something creative with my photos. I decided to take another photography class second semester and the only one available was a traditional course. While I wanted to do digital, I thought of this as a new opportunity to learn something totally different. After a crash course on 35mm photography, I was ready to print in the darkroom. After that course, I had the benefit of being able to edit and print both digital and traditional photographs. After a year without any photography classes, I decided to take photo studio to break up my senior year schedule. The work I have done this semester has been the most meticulous and masterful work I have done so far in photo. I have paid more attention to detail and have been able to exercise some more independence when I work. I have also been able to do more radical things with my photographs that I wasn’t able to do in my intro to photography classes. Next semester I hope to be able to bridge the gap between traditional and digital photo and use both techniques to create my photos. I like the look of 35mm photos printed in the darkroom but I also enjoy the flexibility of digital. By using both methods, I think I can make really interesting photos that have the look of a traditional darkroom image. The picture of the flourmill is the most important work to me because it is a memory from my childhood. When I was younger my parents would take me there and I decided to take a photo of it for our “history” project. I would say this piece was the most difficult to print because it was is a 35mm photo and the negatives I used were very thick and I had to dodge and burn the image to get it to look right. I think it turned out well in the end and it is one of my favorite images that I have taken all semester.