Hi. My name is Jasmine and I’m 15 years old. My social life consists of blogging and photography.
Other interests that I have are reading, music, and various visual arts like drawing/sketching, painting, creating, etc.
My love for visual arts first began with graphic designing. A few years ago, I found this really cool website that had cool graphics, backgrounds, photos, etc. It was all Myspace (yeah, the social networking site) content. I found a link to an ‘about me’ on the site and read that it was owned and ran by a teenage girl who was very dedicated to her website. I knew that because she spent a fortune buying the IP address and editing software. The website is now longer up and running, but after seeing her website, I found others just like hers that also made Myspace content. I was into social networking sites, though. I didn’t even have a Myspace account! I still found the graphic designs those girls had on their website intriguing. I discovered online editing software called ‘Photofiltre’ and got a free download from Google. Photofiltre isn’t as cool or advanced as Photoshop is. Photoshop confused me and would give my computer a virus every time I found a free download. I decided to use Photofiltre and try to make my own graphic designs. After a few days, I was pretty good at it. I created a website hosted by freewebs and started to show off my own graphic designs. I even made some personally for my friends who used Myspace.
The start of my own website lead to the world of html coding. I can’t give you a dumbed-down definition of HTML, but it stands for HyperText Markup Language and it is used in web pages. I used it for layouts and such on my website. To be honest, I’m not sure how I figured out the coding and everything, I was only 11 or 12 years old, but I did and I personalized my own codes and designs to use. It may be confusing to those who don’t know anything or much about it, but after getting the hang of it, it’s actually fun and easy to use. From all of this, I am skilled at graphic designing and html coding.
I have been into visual arts for basically my entire life, but interested in photography for about three years now. I post my presentable photos onto my flickr accounts for people to see and give me feedback on. I first started taking pictures with my mom’s red Kodak camera. It was just a small point-and-shoot with not so great image quality but I pretty much abused it since I had no other camera to use. The first photos I’ve ever uploaded to a flickr account, my first flickr account, was of a naked tree filled with snow that I took in my backyard. I took many photos on that snow day, edited them with Photofiltre, and posted them to flickr. I posted a while longer onto that flickr account, but then created a new one because I started disliking my photostream. I deleted my old account with little views, comments, and favorites. On the account after that, I posted more and different photos. I saved up money for a better camera, and my first camera that I owned. It was a Canon PowerShot. I had completely changed the way I edited my photos, and in my opinion, over-edited them. On that account, I was surprisingly gaining a bunch of attention on my photos! I even got a few of them explored- before I even knew what explored was. I was very proud of myself. But like the first time, I started to not like my photostream. The over-editing was driving me crazy and my photos just didn’t look right. The ideas I had for my photos were stupid. I began to realize how unprofessional they looked and I was completely disgusted. I had to delete that account… and fast! I was also a tad bit sad, knowing that I would also be throwing away my thousands of views on my photostream. I was sure that my contacts were tired of following me from account to account and I would lose them and the attention they gave my photos. After that, I created another account started to take decent photos. My dad had given me my very first D-SLR camera. It was a Nikon D3000. I instantly fell in love with it. As for my photostream, I didn’t gain that many views, comments, or favorites as before. It wasn’t the attention that mattered most, it was the content. I no longer use that same account now. I spent about 9 months on that account… then I reached to 200 photo limit. My mom wasn’t going to pay 25 dollars to give me a pro account, so I made another account, and hopefully my last. I am currently still using this account and I started a few weeks ago. On this account I will be giving more thought into my photos, not necessarily doing a new style of my photography though. I’ve been getting even less attention on my photos than before, but I am finally content with my photostream and my photos are getting better and better. I’ve even gotten into shooting film! My uncle, a professional photographer, gave me a SLR Canon film camera after hearing that I was into photography. From then on, I always have my digital and film camera by my side. Photography is my life and I hope to make something of it in the near future.
