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Introduction – Jay Johnson

Hello, my name is Jay. I just completed my first year at UAA and am now a sophomore (yay!). I’m double majoring in Art and English with a minor in Creative Writing- I want to write and illustrate original fiction professionally like Tolkien. I took the photograph above in March of this year in a neighborhood here in Anchorage. This isn’t one of my best shots, but it’s an example of the type of photography I’d like to get better at (night shots or shots with low lighting). This picture was taken with a Canon 6D with a 50mm lens.

Why am I taking Beginning Photography? I want to learn how to take REALLY good shots for many reasons, one of them being so I can photograph my own art process instead of paying someone else to do it- another reason being that I want to learn how to do food photography. I started getting into taking pictures with my smartphone a few years ago and after taking a few thousand pictures of restaurants for Google Maps, I decided to get serious. So I saved up money. After saving enough, I bought my first photography camera in Portland, Oregon- a Canon 6D Mark II with a 50 mm lens (and a Ricoh Theta, but I’ve sold that since) . I have spent the last few years practicing photography on my own with the Canon, reading photography books libraries and watching tutorial videos on YouTube. I recently bought my first macro lens, but haven’t used it much yet. This is the first class I’ve ever taken on photography- I’m hoping it’ll help fill in the gaps of my self-taught knowledge.

Thank you,

-Jay