This time 3 years ago I decided to make a dA account. I was 13 years and 3 weeks old- a time when I thought it was cool to not use capital letters or grammar of any type. How embarrassing. Thankfully I grew out of that rather quickly... now I am aged 16 and 3 weeks and have realised the importance of apostrophes.

When I first joined dA, I decided I'd have a go at digital art after following `priteeboy. However digital art turned out to be harder than it looks- and it looks hard. This was about as good as it got. After that I decided to venture into the world of emoticons. I entered a competition with this and I actually was placed 3rd... I guess you could say I was pretty stoked about that.

However it slowly dawned on me that I wasn't really getting anywhere with drawing (digital and traditional) or emoticons. At that point I decided to pick up my camera (Samsung P100, used it until last March) and gave photography a go, thinking it would be easy. "How hard can it really be to take a decent picture?" I wondered. Stupid naïve 13 year old me. Here is my first photography submission. Le cringe. But I was hooked, and still am to this day. In March last year I got a new camera (slightly delayed Christmas/Birthday present...), this time a Fujifilm Finepix HS20 bridge camera thing. I'm still waiting for that dream dSLR... I should get a job.
So there in a brief few paragraphs is a summary of how I got into photography.

However, dA has taught me more than just photography. Living in a sleepy semi-rural town in England, full of upper-middle class white British people, things often got a bit same-y, and I found it hard to imagine people out there like me. Thanks to dA, I have visited every corner of the globe, discovered new cultures, interesting people, and learnt to accept myself for who I am. Now I am 16 and have finally been given slightly more independence by my parents (I'm their first child, it was always going to be difficult... ), I am feeling much more hopeful about the future. I have found a hobby I love, I have met great, fantastic people and seen so many beautiful places (which I hope one day to see with my own eyes) through this website. I want to say an absolutely massive thank you to Katy (^Kaz-D), as she has, for the past couple of years, inspired me to continue to photograph and to improve and to photograph some more, and has been amazingly supportive, and another huge thank you to ~CoronaChrome, who has been just fantastic. Thank you to everyone who helped me and supported me in some way, thank you to all my friends and watchers. You guys are awesome.

Thus ends the soppy journal. ~TheSquareBrick