The DeAngelo Family

Grenada is the perfect place to find and develop creative new hobbies if you're here as a student spouse. I wish I could have taken better advantage of this ability during our first year here, but I was pretty busy being in survival mode. Basically, I was doing good on a day-to-day basis if I made dinner, made the bed, and made it through an hour or so of Netflix after finishing a work project. And that's where I was at that point in my life, and now I get to be in hobby-developing mode! I like this mode much better than survival mode, for the record. But even that had its place.

As it turns out, I love to make videos. A lot. Sometime in the past month it occurred to me—why not try to expand this videography thing? I've been in the blogging world for a long time, and something I'd often read was, "Just because you happen to have a nice camera doesn't mean you can be a professional photographer." Or in my case, videographer, And simply put, that's not true. I do understand that simply having a nice camera doesn't automatically make you skilled, but if you really love to do something and practice it and actively try to learn more about it, then I see no reason why you can't make something real of it.

With that in mind, I've started to build a bit of a video portfolio. Grenada is a great place to do this because (a) it's interesting, (b) it's chalk-full of young families, couples, and single students who would love a video memory of this incredibly important part of their lives, and (c) I have literally NO competition. At the end of each term there's a scramble for people who are about to leave the island to pay to have nice pictures taken. Although there are quite a few photographers, there aren't enough to meet the demand. Jared and I have a branch friend who bought a basic DSLR camera last term to start taking pictures as a hobby. Within five months he had saved up enough from SGU student groups who would beg him to take their pictures with his nice camera that he upgraded to a really expensive new full-frame DSLR with the money they'd shove into his pockets (even after he told them he'd do it for free). Many of these same people are ecstatic about the idea of a video of them in Grenada, and guess what? I'm the only one who can give it to them. Basically, this place is a hobbyist's dream come true. So as a message to future SGU student wives (I know you're reading this), please take that to heart at the very beginning instead of waiting two years to catch on like I did.

Here is my very first official portfolio video of our friends Cherish and Tony and Baby Bridget. My camera's video quality isn't as crisp as I'd like it to be, but this video still made their family back home cry. Most people either don't notice or don't care about the less-crisp quality, and hey, if I can make this work here, then I'll be able to upgrade when we move back to America. Here's to chasing crazy pipe dreams!

The DeAngelo Family from Laura Lambert on Vimeo.