As you may have noticed, with a URL of JEmmelPhotos, this is my photography website. Honestly, I haven’t found a great workflow to consistently post photos on here so it’s fairly outdated and not overly populated… I’m working on that. On the topic of photography though, I put my foot in the door of photography in 8th grade. I had seen a lot of ‘Clone Composite’ shots and Long Exposures in various YouTube videos and really wanted to recreate them. At the time I only had a small point-and-shoot Fuji-film digital camera that was only okay for taking pictures. After saving my pennies (and having it being around Christmas) I got my first ‘professional’ camera. A Sony A57. I still have that camera (as well as that Fiji!) but technology has advanced a lot since then. With it though, I was able to get into the world of photography and took most of the older photos you see on this site! I had this camera for 4-5 years until I finally upgraded to a much more modern camera – a Sony a6300. Getting this new camera felt almost the same as when I had gotten the first one all those years ago. All the fancy new features and improvements from the older one. Eventually I discovered Full-Frame cameras and have never looked back. I bought a used Sony a7 off of eBay and eventually upgraded to the Sony a7r.
I only have done a couple of those ‘Clone Composite’ shots. If you don’t know, for those you put the camera on a tripod, and use either a remote shutter or the shutter timer and position yourself in various places throughout the frame. After taking multiple pictures like this you composite them all together so there are a bunch of clones of yourself. Long Exposures, however, I have done a lot of. Mostly in regards to time-lapses. Initially I was big into light painting, but I was never that good at creating actual drawings or anything and stuck with taking pictures of the stars. My last note on the topic of cameras – when my grandfather passed I ended up with a Kodak Vigilant Six-20, a medium format film camera and have been trying to immerse myself in analog photography. Being limited to only 8 shots per roll of film definitely limits what pictures you can take which adds a new depth to the images that I do end up taking.
Some more about me, growing up I was always surrounded by the latest and greatest technology. This meant that I was always learning how to use these new tools which helps greatly in both troubleshooting and fixing everything I may encounter. This primarily started by assisting my father with a/v work at a local church. Initially I helped run the media side of things which consisted of projecting lyrics during worship, flyers, videos, and scripture passages. My earliest memory of this was in 7th grade. I remember working on the lyrics before service and asking a couple different people if the lyrics were blurry up on the screen. That was when I discovered I need glasses. This then expanded to helping run sound, then finally adjusting our audio system at various different locations. A couple times we had a traveling theatre company come to our church and perform. Because of our involvement with tech at our church, we were interested in what equipment this group used as well as how they operated. Little did I know at the time, but this was going to be the official gateway into the theatre world for me. The unofficial gateway was around the same time though. In middle school (at least 7th and 8th grade, I’m not sure about 6th) I ran the light-board for the musicals they put on.
One of our family friends is an aspiring actress, and decided to join this theatre group, and my dad ended up helping at a couple shows while she was with them. I ended up going to an audition with no intention of actually acting, just helping out, and walked out with a part. I remember aspiring for the role of ‘Red Beard’ back in elementary school, but hadn’t considered acting since. I ended up doing for tours with this group. We would travel to different churches each Sunday with nothing but a trailer. Everything from the set, costumes, makeup, and sound were all in that trailer. We would set everything up in the morning, do the show, tear it back down and head home. It was a lot of work as each church was different, but it was so much fun. The main organizer of this group is big in the local community theatres which opened the door for me to them as well. After helping a local youth theatre I became a Theatre Technician Shadow at the Snohomish County PUD. While I was there I learned how to program and operate digital audio and lighting systems. I even ended up getting a portable version of the lighting software we used. I had been doing all of this essentially concurrently with my and and we ended up collecting our own equipment similar to that which we used at the PUD.
And then, COVID hit. My theatre life came to a screeching halt. By this time I was just finishing my third year at EvCC, and was steadily growing in confidence in the engineering field. Fortunately, my education has remained seemingly unaffected by this, but we still haven’t really gotten back into theatre. I did, however, get into film making. Because my connection to theatre, and my background with photography, I was able to marry those two passions into film making. The organizer of the traveling theatre group, and now a good friend of mine, was looking for options to continue the arts program at Archbishop Murphy High School during the pandemic. They decided on a film. I ended up editing their film Love at First Zoom. The next year they again decided to do a film and I assisted as their Director of Photography and Editor. Because I had a much larger involvement with their second show, and from the many things learned in producing the first movie, Bridgehurst Asylum for the Sane ended up a much better film than the first. We are currently planning their next film, however due to my school schedule I am determining my level of involvement with it.