about me - laura bernard

My name is Laura Bernard and I am a 23 year old photography student at Seneca@York in Canada.  Ever since I was a child I have been exposed to photography.  Growing up, my father always had a camera in his hand and there are many family photo albums to attest to this fact.  I became used to being the subject matter and remember countless days in Florida where my sister and I would be playing on the beach or watching the sunset, and my dad was there capturing our happy expressions.  I received my first camera as a gift from my parents for my birthday.  It couldn’t zoom or do anything remotely special, but i loved it anyways.  I mainly took pictures of the animals in my life at the time - my rabbit as well as my Aunt’s dog - and i remember waiting anxiously for my pictures to be developed to see what kind of shots I had managed to get.  For a while I left the world of photography and started focusing more on trying to become a Veterinarian.  It wasn’t until my dad borrowed a digital camera from the school where he worked that I started to get back into photography.  Shortly after that, I was given my first point and shoot 3 mega-pixel digital camera, and since then I haven’t stopped taking pictures.

Animals have always been a major part of my life, so in order to get pictures of more animals I started attending dog shows.  I took hundreds of photos of show dogs of every breed, colour and size.  From there, I started walking dogs and would exercise the dogs for an extended period of time and then sit them down for a photoshoot.  I’ve always felt like I’ve been able to capture the essence of the animals I photograph and I believe that is shown in my pictures.  Along with animals, I thoroughly enjoy taking pictures at concerts or larger events.  I started attending many concerts and through this learned how to tweak the manual controls on my camera.  Although I was there for the music, I was also there to try and capture an emotional moment in the artist’s lives as they sang the songs that made them who they were.

I try to expose myself to as many different forms of photography as I can and because of this, I’ve never truly settled on the type of photography that I would like to get myself into.  I’m constantly looking for inspiration and trying to learn new things.  As long as I am able to capture that one moment in time, a moment that makes someone smile, think, feel moved or leaves them with inspiration, I will feel as though I have succeeded in being a photographer.  To see a few more pieces of my work, please click here.

     

all images in this blog entry are © Laura Bernard