Intro Blog

     Hello everyone, I am Thomas Smith, and today you will be formally introduced to me through my first blog post. I am in the 10th grade at Fort Lauderdale Highschool in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which I attend through the Cambridge Magnet Program. I have a passion for gaining useful knowledge that benefits me in the future, therefore I have extremely mixed opinions on my school and our education system as a whole. I plan to support myself and (hopefully) my family in the future with a job at a local news station as chief meteorologist. Hurricane season and its anomalies are what persuaded me to choose this career path. Contrastingly, as for choosing AICE Media Studies, I chose this class because of my interest in the film industry. I am deeply fascinated with film production and everything that happens behind the scenes in terms of how every piece of media plays its own vital role in creating films. My family would say that I gained this somewhat strange fascination at the early age of five when creating "film sets" with fake snow for photos near the Christmas tree. Although, I feel that 10 would be a more appropriate age considering the fact that I didn't fully understand how phone cameras worked until then. At the time, I was a fourth-grader who, as the younger sibling, would constantly do anything to please the older one, which (in my instance) mostly consisted of taking pictures for a 15-year-old sister. As I was continuously asked, in the words of my sister, Darylin, to "take my pics," I realized new methods to create better photos without professional editing, as a result, as the years progressed, so did my skills. I decided to widen my understanding of photography by paying close attention to movies and applied their techniques to my personal projects. Surprisingly, this approach to gaining useful knowledge worked and my photography and videography skills improved tremendously by the end of 2017. Unfortunately, after my sister's departure to a college more than 700 miles away, I began to quickly lose interest in most forms of media, mainly due to me losing my "personal model." Fortunately, with my first experience with a professional camera, a fire was reignited. In the winter of 2018, my father purchased a camera generally used for semi-professional photoshoots and I was instantly drawn towards it. I found that the person (more often than not) had more fun taking and editing photos compared to the person in the photos. From then on, my interest became more of an addiction, with me taking photos at every opportunity, such as my prom or summer vacation for 2019. Although, I would credit my schedule for the 2019-2020 school year as the key factor in my decision to choose this class. For my fifth period, I had Communications Technology Honors 1, which consisted of editing a multitude of photos using PhotoShop. It was in that class, in the middle of the third quarter of the school year where I looked over my course selection sheet, read the course description, and realized that this course wasn't a graduation requirement but something I needed to complete to satisfy the 10-year-old photographer within me.