Autobiographical+Incident

My Autobiographical Incident I had just arrived home from school one day, after having been on a field trip for the day. And like every day, I spent it talking with my two best friends Devon and Chloe. I went to Kemps Landing Magnet School, KLMS for short, and it was a very small school. There were only 600 students, and because of the school’s size, everyone knew everyone, but there weren’t three people closer then Devon, Chloe, and I. We went everywhere and did everything together, and when we couldn’t do something together, we would write each other notes or call each at the end of the day to talk about what the others had missed. One thing we did quite often was take pictures. We always seemed to have a camera around and we would fill the memory card to bursting with photos of us individually, of us together, or even of what little snack we were eating. Our favorite thing to take pictures of was Devon. She would always make the funniest faces that we would spend hours laughing over later. Well on this particular day, I was trying to think what we should do with all of these photos that had had taken over the last three years. I didn’t want to just have them; I wanted to put them all together to make a book or something to have them together, forever. I was thinking I would love to make a photo album, like the ones you make by hand, but that would cost too much and would take too much time to create three, one for each of us. And then an idea came to me. Every year for Christmas, my family gets my grandparents the same gift, but the parts to the present are always different. My mom makes a photo album with pictures of the family from the Christmas before up to right the right before the new Christmas. All of the members of my immediate family love either being in or taking photos so we end up having over a thousand a year, I’m sure. Originally my mom had made three copies by hand, such as I had wanted to, but that soon was found to be very time consuming and much too expensive, so she found a new way to make photo albums. Digitally. When we bus dropped me off in front of my house, I raced down my lengthy, gravel driveway and into my house through the garage. I dropped my school things on the stair case that led up to my room, and went around the corner into the computer room where my mom was sitting working on editing some photos we had taken the preceding weekend. I stood by her side, hugged her hello and then said, “Hey mom, so you know how I have like all of these photos of Devon, Chloe, and I? So I was thinking, can I make a photo album on the computer with all of our pictures?” “Yeah, sure, do you know how to make the pages?” “Um… no. Could you tell me how?” “Of course. Ok, so the first thing you want to do is pick out the color scheme you want.” She led me through the steps on how to set up the programs, to pick which “papers” to use, and then how to set up a page the way I wanted to. She taught me how to use a program called Photoshop, and how that could be used to make a page in a similar way you can make one by hand. She had years ago, taught me many tricks and techniques on how to create photo album pages and cards, and ways to makes them more creative. She showed me all sorts of way that that could be done on the computer as well. Once we had a page set up with boxes in places we wanted pictures and text boxes that would later be filled with commentary on a particular event that the page was showing, she said we had to pick some photos. We went through hundreds of photos from over the last three years. We created a folder just for the photos for this little project we were making together. Once we had all of the photos that I wanted to use in the album, she then taught me how to edit them. She showed me how to use different brushes, such as the Dodge Tool, the Clone Stamp Tool, and the Spot Healing Brush Tool, which are used to remove unwanted spotting, discoloration, and lightening. She then taught me how to use another program called Lightroom, which is used to change the lighting with more precision and professionalism. It can also be used to change your photo into Black and White, Sepia, and Negative. But unlike other programs it has these effects with multiple layers, so depending on the photo; you can pick one that suits it best. After she had taught me all of this, she left me to myself to start working on the album and putting everything together. In a little under an hour, my mother and opened up a door to a whole new world for me. I spent hours at the computer playing with different tool, effects, and programs that were all together like a fairytale world full of possibilities. And from just one little hour with my mom, she had helped me find a road that led me to one of the biggest decisions of my life; that I wanted to become a photographer when I grew up.