Artist Statment
My grandma always told me to follow my dreams and never let them go. When my grandma was telling me this, she was laying in a hospital bed. Ever since I heard the news that my grandma had stage 4 cancer in her breast, I knew I wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. I took everything to heart with what my grandma was telling me, she told me to follow my dreams. She told me that “we never know when our last day is, so live it to the fullest.” I take photos now because I found a passion for it in high school and haven’t stopped since then. I remember I had to take pictures of our cross-country team at a meet. Yearbook told me to take photos of the cross-country meets. I had no idea what I was doing at the time. It didn’t matter though because while I was taking pictures I had so much fun. I was capturing moments in time of my friends running their races. After the first cross-country meet, I had to keep taking more pictures. I was the only student that wanted to rent the camera so that I could take pictures. Over the years at Siena, I’ve had many opportunities to improve my skills in capturing photos and networking with different companies. I want to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of storytelling through my photography.
When it comes to taking pictures there are so many different ways that I try to capture with my camera. I would use studio lightings such as strobe lights, soft boxes, backdrops, and color jells. That’s just a way to make the background look fantastic, but I always like to look at the finer details before I take my picture. For me, I always look at my model's wrists to see if they would be wearing a hair tie, fix their hair so there it’s that one strain in the way, making sure that my foreground is clean, and that there is no one walking behind them photobombing the picture. I take pride in the work that I do and even if all of those small details sound crazy, it just means that I know what the photo should look like and I know how to make everyone look good. After the models are ready to go, I like to consider how I would take the picture. Taking the picture depends on where I am, what’s the weather like, and what camera settings should I use. When I was learning how to use my camera, I would always use the portrait mode that was on the camera until I got into my photography class. My teacher made me use manual mode 24/7, and I didn’t mind it because I really wanted to know how to use my camera. I wanted to learn everything I can about my Canan 1Dx. In that class, I learned a lot about composition, lighting, foreground, and situational awareness.
