Boxes

Something still caught my eye about images in high school and during that time I was trying to find ways to practice photography through extracurriculars.

My motivation to join a variety of clubs started to muddle with college applications. I was of the belief that in order to be accepted by any college I needed to have all of my time accounted for in ways that demonstrated my worth to an institution.

Fortunately the majority of the activities I ended up participating in were things that I had a general interest in.

In my off-kilter navigation I stumbled into a yearbook club, which you could only join in your Junior or Senior year. I thought that this extra curricular could meet a few of the check marks I was after for my applications and help me learn more about something I was interested in as a hobby. I could use different editing tools, possibly take photos with the school camera and tie the experience into some skillset that colleges were after.

Around this time I had gotten my first personal computer and no longer had to rely on the singular family desktop. Smart phones were just starting to use the internet in useful ways, but most applications were still done via paper handouts, which further increased the value of having access to a “digital camera” and software editing tools.

The yearbook club was in session during a lunch hour period, which was when I first went to their classroom for an application.

There was an acute level of excitement, a sort of thrill that rolled through the room when I asked for the application form from the teacher who remarked something to the effect that I’d be just the second boy to join! To the teacher this was very exciting, the emotion expressed in an unbridled, joyful way. It wasn’t laced with any judgment, but I had an emotional contortion that triggered a subtle, internal cringe at the prospect of being one of the few boys to participate.

I didn’t end up filling out the application.

It was handy that there just happened to be another extra curricular during the same time slot that ticked other boxes I was after, so it was fine, I didn’t have to make it seem like I felt embarrassed at the prospect of being the near singular boy in a room of roughly two-dozen girls.

Maybe in my self consciousness I denied myself an opportunity to practice some fundamentals of photography, or maybe I wouldn’t have gotten much time with a camera, or maybe it would have been an unwelcome or even bad experience. It didn’t happen so I wouldn’t know.

The next year I was able to work with photos in a different way, it was through an English class.

Junior year was when all of my advanced placement courses started, I should not have taken as many as I did, but paranoia over college made me push. Since I was the oldest in my family I had no one to compare what going to college actually looked like for someone my age.

Much like my demotivation to apply to yearbook, which was not something I explained to anyone at the time, it was nearly impossible to dissect everyone’s emotion from their application experience. What went into their college search, how much were scholarships actually worth and did they actually end up enjoying their program? These were big questions with answers I didn’t have access to. So the lack of clarity around the process prompted a sort of academic industrial complex, where I may have stunted myself slightly, or just over-stressed because I overcommitted to courses in fear that I wasn’t doing enough.

Even though our calendar was broken into blocks — for the fall semester you had one set of classes and then for the spring you’d have another — due to testing dates, the advanced placement classes went all year round.

The biggest project of my English class was a scrapbook where you put together as much of your family history and future goals that you were capable of researching. The project was a behemoth between the research, self reflecting essays and sorting through all your near and long-term goals. It also made up the bulk of your grade. 

The project incorporated a lot of family photos, a genetic yearbook, so my draw to images stayed present.

Digitizing old photos, going through photo books and boxes, talking to family members about our distant relatives, further sustained my intrigue in images. At some point I figured that certain aspects of this project, like documenting my life, would have been made easier with a better camera.

I find it tricky to pinpoint but between this project, my trips to the U.S. Open and the impending change of leaving home for some sort of college — for all my angst I had a heightened sense of self-assuredness, that I would be going somewhere new — I eventually decided to invest in another device that I figured could capture images and withstand some impending technological advancements.

While I no longer have the receipt to verify when I got the *camera, I know I purchased it sometime after I turned 17 because I drove myself to a local BestBuy to pick out a “grown up” digital camera.

I also recall being between buying a Nikon and Canon but I know — and probably knew then — that I was not really capable of discerning between the two models, or able to understand what benefits one system had over the other.

Maybe it was my early digital PowerShot camera but I ultimately settled on a Canon Rebel t2i along with a kit lens.

This was one of the most substantial investments that I made up to that point in my life and I justified the camera because I felt that over the course of 10 years the images I got from it, and the learning experience, would be worth the price.

My learning curve was steep and I had a really hard time sorting through how to use the camera and its accompanying lens. I didn’t really make much use of it at the end of high school. There were just a handful of moments where I somehow aligned the buttons to get an image.

By my own grading system I was falling behind, but the intangible aspect of the purchase was that I was about to go somewhere new, and that’s when I felt the investment would pay off in some way, and that I’d eventually get something memorable out of it.

*according to the camera’s release date of March 2010 confirms that I was over the age of 17 when I purchased it.