Rebecca has been interested in photography for as long as she could remember. Remembering, as a young child, when her mother would bring home prints fresh from the developer, she would finger each photo with wonder, like precious stones. The first camera she ever held was a red toy, and she would run around the basement as a toddler pretending to take photos of her family members. At every family get-together, on every family vacation, a bright yellow and black disposable camera was present, her mother or father hiding behind it with their faces half covered up, peering through the viewfinder and telling them all to "Say cheese!" Rebecca was enthralled, and would beg her father to take photos of her with even the most insignificant of objects, at the most insignificant of times, to capture the memory forever in prints, which her mother would then date laboriously before gently placing them into their respected spots in family albums.
Skipping purchasing her own disposable camera, Rebecca went straight to the point-and-shoot digital cameras, influenced by her younger sister, who had received one for her birthday and would take photo after photo without ever letting her older sister touch it. Her first camera, purchased in 2005 at the age of thirteen, was a bright red Kodak point-and-shoot. She brought it with her everywhere she went, including the beach, where one day, on the California shore line, sand got into the lens after the camera was dropped and subsequently destroyed. She begged her parents to replace it, empty without the constant companionship a camera provided, and heavily mourned its loss. One day, her father took her to Best Buy, and together they picked out what they thought was the best digital camera that the meager amount of money they had could buy: a stainless steel HP point-and-shoot with an optical and digital zoom that was astounding for its time. A new friendship was born.
During this time, Rebecca received a hand-me-down film camera from her father, to be used in her high school film photography class. Rebecca was introduced to a whole new world of photography - the creativity and freedom of a single lens reflex camera. But, after never quite getting the hang of darkroom procedure (especially the spooling of film in a pitch black room) coupled with the loss of her stainless steel HP point-and-shoot, which was stolen from her car while parked in her friend's driveway one July night, she began looking into digital single lens reflex cameras, and bought her first - a Canon EOS Rebel T3/1100D - n September of 2012, after persuading her mother to give her the four hundred dollars needed to purchase it. Over the years, new lenses, extension tubes, lens filters, tripods, and other accessories were purchased to keep Rebecca's now-dated DSLR from becoming obsolete. Yet still, six years later, the camera and all its gear goes with Rebecca whenever she leaves the house, despite having a perfectly sufficient iPhone camera readily at hand at all times, and she learns something new about the art of photography all the time, taking year-round courses on the art through her local library and community college, and studying extensively on the internet.
Newly added to her photographic arsenal is a lime green Fujifilm Instax Mini 9, a small analog camera that produces Polaroid-like photos on demand, complete with all the accessories, including twelve clip-on colored lens filters. Versatile with her equipment and passionate about her craft, Rebecca photographs with a fervent obsession, capturing photos of everything that's beautiful in this world through any means she has on hand - whether that be her smartphone, her DSLR, or her newly-acquired Polaroid camera.