Hobby: Something to take our minds off real life.
Over my twenty five years of life I have picked up many hobbies. When I was in grade school, I collected rocks and minerals. I then moved to collecting comic books, dvds, and coins. When I was a kid I loved to ride my bicycle and this has continued into adulthood but now I've made a hobby out of adding upgrades and attachments to my bike. My most recent hobby has become photography and more specifically light painting photography.
I know photography is a common hobby among the young and old but I never realized how many elderly people were really into it until I moved to a coastal community where many people came to retire. I am enrolled in a photography class at the local community college and the majority of the class is above the age of 50. I am the only person under the age of 30 in the class and this surprised me until I saw a picture in the local newspaper about a photography club that meets in town. There were about a dozen people in the picture showing off their award winning photographs and all of the people had white hair (ie they were definitely retirement age). I noticed that all of the older people did either landscape photography or wildlife photography. In my class now, the older people want to do landscape photography and the "middle-aged" people want to do portrait photography. As a youngster in this group, I am completely beside myself. I want to do something different that other people haven't thought of or really seen that much of.
I came across light painting when I first got my camera and I was looking up all that it could do. I was watching Youtube videos (which is how I learn to do most things anymore) when I came across a man named Wes Whaley who was in a video doing a pregnancy portrait using light painting to do something different than the usual 'pregnant woman posing' picture. I fell in love. This is what I wanted to do. I found some more graffiti looking pictures taken using the light painting technique and I've used those to help get me started. I bought a couple different flashlights at Walmart and Home Depot and most nights I go outside after dark simply to mess around to see what kind of effect I can get out of each flashlight and each mixture of different flashlights together. This is what I've come up with so far:
Now I work as a waitress at a Waffle House and we work off of tips. My next new hobby came from a one dollar bill I received as a tip. I had a stamp on it that said "Track me to see where I've been www.wheresgeorge.com" I was curious about the stamp so I checked out the website (hoping my virus software would protect my computer from any unwanted viruses or hackers). I was fascinated by the ability to track a piece of money all over the world. I tracked my bill to Ohio and California. I was hooked. I looked up some videos on Youtube (of course) about Where's George and found that thousands of people track these bills and there are actually a lot of people who stamp every bill they receive and register it on the website so that the bill can be tracked later. My curiosity grew until I marked a few bills of my own, registered them, and sent them out into the world. My intention is to forget about it for a while until I receive an email that a bill has been tracked or I receive another bill with a stamp on it because I think it is in the excitement of not knowing when you will find one or when someone will track a bill you sent out that really catches peoples attention as well as seeing how far away a bill has traveled that now sits in your wallet. My challenge to you is to go to the website next time you find a bill stamped www.wheresgeorge.com and I promise the site is not a plethora of viruses.
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