My name is Garrett Vanderpool. I've always had some sort of admiration for various forms of art, but I never thought that I could be one of the people that made the beautiful things that I was seeing. At the age of maybe 13 or 14, I got a hold of my mother's small digital camera, and that was the beginning of it all. About a year later, I got my first camera that was all my own. From then on, I didn't ever want to go anywhere without my camera.
At first, photography didn't really strike me as something I could study and, hopefully, do for the rest of my life, but it also didn't seem like something I wanted to stop doing ever. Since the first time that I picked up a camera, everything that I did just felt natural. I wasn't immediately trying to capture moments as they happened. I wanted to go deeper. I was interested in fine details and odd angles. Flowers and spiders became my absolute favorite thing to photograph. I was amazed by how close I could get and the amount of detail that I could see in the photographs. It was then that I learned that photography is a form of art, just like painting and sculpting. Photography is my artform to master, and master it I will.
I'm currently a first year student at Eastern Mennonite University, majoring in photography and digital media. I'm still not sure exactly what I want to do after graduation, but I know that I won't stop taking photographs of any and every thing that I can.