Just five days before the Actor John Wayne died of stomach cancer in 1979 i was born, and named john wayne maioriello, in the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Being the son of rich parents had its perks, but mostly i was miserably lonesome in the mansion where i lived in the Hollywood hills. Eventually we moved to Manhattan Beach, a wealthy suburb located about 25 miles south of Hollywood. Within a span of 15 years of moving to the Southbay area of Los Angeles my family went through many changes.

(Don't worry we're all made up, and lovey dovey these days)

When i was out in the world trying to survive, one of the jobs i ended up with was a real estate appraiser, which prompted me to buy my first digital camera, a Sony Mavica that used a floppy disk instead of a memory stick. it was slow, you could only fit 32 1mp pics on a single floppy. I also got this cool fish eye lens. It was the rebirth of photography in my life. A passion i had when i much younger, and had parents paying my developing costs. Now i could take endless pictures, for FREE!! wow!

The Sony Mavica was soon slow and had such small storage, i needed an upgrade. Enter the Sony Cybershot. I thought i had good luck with sony up till now, so why change brands? i already know how their little interface system works, and its comfortable to me.

I had a new job now too, not just a new camera. I was now a full fledged sign guy, working for my cousin. The job required me to be outdoors, driving around in my car, in a new city every weekend, and allowed me to the time to take all kinds of cool pictures.

I eventually quit that job and went back to college. For my photography class i bought a fully manual SLR camera, the Pentax K1000, with a 50mm "normal" lens, capable of both minimum and maximum depth of field. It's such a great camera to learn the basics of manual camera operation, because it literally does almost nothing to help you. You must set your own apeture, shutter speed, film ISO, and focus. If you want to take the leap from casual photographer to serious photographer, its my opinion that you have to start with the ultra basics.

Once i felt i had mastered that camera, i went shopping for my Digital SLR. When you buy a camera like this, you are really buying into a family of lenses. Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony, and al the rest all have their own assortment of lenses, that work only on their corresponding camera bodies. So i decided that i wanted to go with nikon. To me it was between Nikon and Canon, because they both have the largest lens-families and also a lot of other companies make lenses for them both.

And really i chose nikon, because i knew that the lenses at my college were all for nikon camera bodies, and i wanted to get my hands on the 70-200mm f/2 lens.

So to this day, i am the photo editor my school newspaper. I have had my photos published, and sold. On buzznet i am a heavily featured user, with two seperate profiles on me, and 61 featured photos. I've shot professionally at weddings, Hollywood red-carpet events, sports, and live performance. And one day i will reach my goal of working as a photographer for either the Getty, or National Geographic.

Making my fiancé happy, Money, Movies, Music, Photography, Television, News, Journalism, Spanish, Radio, iPhones, live shows, clean laundry, good stuff, bong hits, nite life, writing, observing, eating, 7-11

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