My Journey To Photography-Part 1

childhood memories

If you're anything like me you love to know the "whys" and "hows" behind something. With that in mind, I thought it only fitting as my very first ever blog post that I share the "why" and "how" of my journey to photography. It all began in my childhood with my parent's film tape video camera. We have many a family video of me getting right in people's faces with the camera and them shouting "get away Anna!" My poor parents, who knows how many rolls of film tape I used up over the years!

I'm also known as being kind of bossy....or as I like to call it, "administrative." During my teenaged years my 5 younger siblings and I spent nearly all our free time making movies together with me always being the "boss" aka, director. We would spend hours talking about our plot line, planning costumes from our family dress-up box and filming our movies using our pixilated family camera. We would proudly edit together our prize films on Windows Movie Maker (does that even exist now?!) and then upload them to our Youtube channel named "Movie Making Lovers" (facepalm!). Our most prized movie out of the lot though was the one where we actually spent MONEY on costumes and props to make our movie. We were SO proud to have a budget of $50 of our own hard-earned money to collect all our items. We enlisted the help of all our closest friends and neighbors to have the largest "cast" yet. It was truly our red carpet debut!

Fast forward to my high school years, my mom found a local professional videographer who had won multiple Emmy & Telly awards and asked if I could do some internship training with him. He graciously took me on and taught me so much during my 3-years training under him! There is truly nowhere I was happier than when I was on video shoots with him. Here's a few photos from over the years.

Filming a promo video with the former director of the TN Titans

I was audio engineer on a big voice recording project

Filming a book trailer with my dad

Video Internship

On my second year of internship, a very large Bible animation project came along and the guy I was interning with taught me how to do all the animations. We were taking a Bible comic book and turning it into an animated film for missionaries to use. It was a nearly two-year project where I was head animator, and I learned a TON! It is still in use to this day, click this link to see a sample: Good & Evil Animated Series

My life-changing trip

Once the animation was complete, I was asked to be the "translator trial" to begin the process of translating the animated series into other languages. The ministry the internship guy and I were working under sent me to Laos on a 6-month mission trip to begin the trying process of translating the audio into other languages. I never saw myself as being a missionary, but it was the most life-changing 6-months of my life! I spent nearly 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in a tiny 6x4' room covered in sound-proof foam at the back of a storage building acting as the audio engineer for this translation trial. The recording room quickly became most commonly referred to as "The Foam Cave" and it was incredibly humbling as people from all the remote villages would ride on their motor bikes for miles in the dust & 100+ degrees or flooding rains to come record for this important project. Also, no, I don't speak any Lao, I was working through a translator the whole time. In case you don't know anything about Laos, it is a closed 3-world country....a "nice house" is a 2-room concrete floor building. It was an extremely humbling trip! These photos from my trip will be among some of my most treasured memories!