Photography can be a very rewarding career. Scoring the perfect photo (no matter the kind) can be an amazing feeling to a photographer. However, this is not what I wanted to do when I grew up. I had other plans as a child. This is the story of how I turned to photography.
I grew up finding that I did well in the world of academics. I never had a problem with the hard sciences. However, I was never going to be the top of my class in school but I was very good at my studies. Still, I had determined that I wanted to be a veterinarian when I grew up. I was working hard towards that goal. I also found that I needed an artistic or creative release. For that, I started with music in 4th grade. My trumpet studies fulfilled the needs of the right side of my brain when the academics fed the needs of my left brain. Though out all the time of my public education, this worked very well. It worked well enough for me to continue it in college.
In college, I used my small musical talent to bring in a small but usable scholarship to supplement my tuition fees. I did this for a few years but began to find myself restless with just the marching band and pep band for musical and artistic input. I decided to seek out a music minor. Things were going well enough. I was progressing through school towards a biological major and now I was going to do something with the music end to add to my degree. Also, I got into the program and started enhancing my skills with music.
There were a couple of things that happened at the same time which altered the course of my studies. The first was I took organic chemistry: the bane of many a biological sciences major. I tried taking it a couple of times and did not manage to pass. Anyone who has taken that class knows that it can be one of the most difficult, and yet rather useless, classes on any biology course schedule for graduation. I found I needed to reevaluate my career goals since I was having problems passing organic chemistry.
Another event occurring at about the same time was that I met my husband. We met at work in the computer labs where we were both working. I had previously read a statistic of a 75% divorce rate for vet school students before they graduate. It is supposedly that intense.
I value my marriage enough to not want to throw it away for a career I would eventually leave in retirement. It seemed I had little option. I was going to have to choose a different career in order to keep my marriage.
I enjoyed my job at the computer labs and wanted to make myself more useful at my job. So, I decided one semester that I was going to take a Photoshop class in order to improve my usefulness as a computer lab consultant. I did not know how to use Photoshop but would get the occasional question I could not answer. Unexpectedly, I found that I enjoyed the class and I had developed some minor interest in photography by that point. Also, I learned there was a introductory photography course which would be offered that next semester. I thought I would take it for fun and personal enrichment.
About the time that all this dating and wedding stuff and change of major was going down, my husband and I managed to get ourselves on the wrong side of university politics. It was something small which started the whole affair, but the resulting storm was massive against us and devastating for us. Even when the worst had finished blowing over, there were still consequences we both felt.
After my husband and I got married, I decided that I wanted to join the Wind Ensemble, a spring semester audition-only class. I tried to get in one year and did not make it. My braces were removed just before audition time which destroyed my embouchure (pronounced aum-bu-sure, lip and teeth arrangement to play any kind of wind instrument). Needless to say, my first audition was a flop. The professor instructed me to take his fall semester course and give him a chance to get to know me better, which I did.
Halfway through the semester, the professor posted the list of those who had automatically made it into the Wind Ensemble the next semester. Along with everyone else, I checked for my name. I was disappointed to see that mine was the only name out of the 6 trumpet players who had not made the cut. It would not have bothered me so badly if I hadn’t already been a 2 year minor in the program and a first semester major made the cut before he had completed the jury of his first semester of lessons. Perhaps I was blowing things out of proportion, but I smelled something like preferential treatment or deliberate exclusion. I knew I was still unpopular amongst some of the college administration already.
With this disgust in my system, I removed myself from the music department. Then, I plunged into my intro to photography course. I found that I liked it. I liked it enough to begin considering changing my degree to photography instead. It would meet the necessary artistic side of me while I made my decision about changing my career aspirations. I pursued another advanced course the following semester and made plans to keep going from there. This is how photography became a part of my life.
