Dreams. Part two.

One of the questions in the book, "You Were Made For A God-Sized Dream," by Holley Gerth as I mentioned in my previous post, was something along the lines of: Allow yourself to think big for a moment. Don't think that you don't have enough money, enough talent, enough resources, or that it wouldn't be possible. Just think big. What would be the biggest dream you could think of? Ok, got it? Now, what would be the very first step in getting there from where you are now?

I looked at my list of interests and talents. While they were long, I didn't see any being plausible or worth pursing as a career. Finally, the only one I could think of to the first part of that question, as big as I could think, was, "It would be cool to take pictures for National Geographic, sometimes traveling the world, and sometimes staying local. To be paid to walk through the streets of a foreign country, tropical beaches, or snowy mountains, and just take hundreds of pictures? I mean, who HAS that job?! How the heck do they get that??"

When I was 7 I had a black plastic camera where you had to scroll the wheel in between each picture to advance the film, you had to turn on the flash and let it "warm up," and the back opened up to take out the film. It took like a week or something for the film to be developed at the store. In middle school and most of high school, I used disposable cameras. I could get the picture back in two days, and then you could pay extra for them to get it back in an hour or two, and I always wanted to pay extra. I also always wanted doubles of my pictures, so I could put one set in a photo album, and the other I could cut up and put on my bulletin board, locker, notebook, etc. I didn't get my first digital camera until I was 17, Christmas of my senior year.

In August of 2012, my friend Michael asked me to come on a youth trip with them to a camp called Sharp Top Cove, to take pictures for the weekend for the entire camp. I forget how many kids were there, but I'm going to guess at about 500? Anyways, I knew my camera was good, but not that good, and I wanted it to be amazing photography. I wanted to aim high. So I asked another friend, Chris, if I could borrow his majorly expensive camera and it's multiple lenses. I was actually surprised he said yes because I hadn't known him all that long. So I went and shot pictures the whole weekend, handing over the best pictures every so often throughout the weekend so they could put it in a slideshow for the kids to see (6th-12th grade). It was such a cool experience, being the main photographer. It was then I thought, maybe I want to do this all the time. But I don't know how.

So I guess you could say for 16 months I looked for jobs in photography, but not the entire time because it was discouraging. I looked for other jobs too, but nothing came up. Finally, a week before Thanksgiving, I met someone who works with Chick-fil-a corporate and I asked him who takes their pictures? He said, "We get interns sometimes from schools in Atlanta, like SCAD, and we also have this other guy we have hired." Oh, SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) is like a million dollars. Cool. Like I have that kind of money. I searched for other schools in the Atlanta area that had photography programs though, and came up with three. I went and visited two last week and I think I'm going to one and start in April because it's on the quarter system. I hope I get in.

I am worried about money, debt, working less, time management, being good enough... but my excitement is equal to it, so I'm ok. I've heard stories of the people who come out of those schools, and they go on to do amazing and huge things! Two years is nothin' compared to my 5 in undergrad! Right? Right. I hope to make new friends that I keep in touch with for a long time, I know I'll learn a ton, and I hope that God will then lead me on to a great job.