my humble introduction

Good morning/afternoon/evening, readers!
This is the first in a series of blogs I will be posting concerning photography.
My name is Valerie O'Shea. I'm a college student from New Jersey, majoring in Writing Arts, Elementary Education, and getting my certificate of Reading. In fact, creating and writing in this blog is actually an assignment for one of my classes- to make a research based blog about a chosen topic. Despite the fact that I am going to school for teaching, I am, at heart, an artist. My passions lie in writing, music, and especially photography. I decided to blog about photography because it is something I am very interested in, very passionate about, and very active with. My experience as an 'amateur photographer' began when I was in third grade and my family went on vacation to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. I saw such beauty there that I kept begging my father, an amateur photographer himself, to borrow his camera. That year for Christmas he bought me my first SLR camera and, as they say, the rest is history.
I've decided to focus this blog on sharing informative and useful resources for anyone interested in photography, as well as sharing tips that I have picked up over the years. I intend to learn a lot through my research and I hope that you (the reader) enjoy it as I present it to you!

Edit: When thinking more about how to organize my research, I realized that 'photography' was a much broader topic than I wanted to tackle. I felt almost complelled to write about the history of photography, descriptions and explanations of the many aspects of a camera, lenses, filters, etc. These are things that are of interest to photographers, but not things I particularly want to research. Thus, I have slightly narrowed my focus. I am very interested in the actual process of taking pictures and improving my own photography, so I've decided to research different sources to find all kinds of tips for novice and amateur photographers. I know that there is so much for me to learn, and I want to share that all with you.