Photography and Car Accidents

I suppose my photographic ventures started when I was young.  My mom had a film SLR that I would spend hours shooting with, no matter how underexposed, or out of focus my pictures were, I thought they were the greatest things the world had seen (far from the truth...but a kid can dream).  Throughout high school it seemed like the teachers were not only teaching us math, english, and sciences, but also that creativity is a very unlikely path for a career.  So, for a few years photography went on the shelf while I did the 'career building' course.  In my last two years of high school I lost faith in the by-the-book courses and started playing with cameras again.  After two years of university and hobby photography I found out about PrairieView and now here I am.  With hopes that this school will offer me a much more interesting future than a business degree at the U of M would.

I really want to learn composition, as right now I feel I am to reliant on the power of photoshop to help me crop and recompose where I may have missed my target, as well as learning the business side of photography.

Since everything is kind of a secret right now since we don't really know each other 

I could take the easy way out.  Like saying my secret is I'm turning the big 2-0 on the 23rd.  But that would be too easy.  My secret would be, I've had a near death experience.  Not to say I saw a white light or I was mortally wounded and saved by modern medicine.  No, more so that by freak chance the conditions were in my favor.  April 4th, 2008 at about 10 p.m. I rolled 

my car, right around the corner of Bishop Grandin and St. Anne's.  Pretty simple accident really, sports car taken out of winter storage too soon.  It was sleeting, I came off of St. Anne's onto Bishop as I was coming into 3rd gear the rear of my car swung around sending me towards the curb (left hand side) of the road.  What I did not realize, until I hit it. Is that beyond that curb, is a ditch.  One that sent my car up into the air to topple a couple of times to land on it's roof.  Now, here's the 'miracle', 'coincidence', whatever you want to call it.  I narrowly missed landing on a cement bike path, which would have had much more impact than the grass already did on the roof of my car.  Attending EMT's told me that had I landed about 2 feet back from where I had...I would most likely not be typing this.

However, fortunately everything went my way.  I actually walked away from that accident with nothing more than a few small cuts from crawling out of the car, and a minor concussion.  Now I'm lucky enough to be here at PrairieView so I can meet all of you fantasticly geeky photography people just like myself!

-Mitch

(if any of you morbid folk are interested, I still got pictures of the car at the MPI wrecking yard)