About

Marisa Kathleen Whitaker: Past to Present (and maybe a little more detail than you’d expect.)
I started writing when I discovered that the Internet lets you type anything you want and put it out into the world. Once I was an active Internet member, I wrote stories in forum-based Role-Playing Games. I detailed the actions of my character (be it human, dog, horse, elf, or wizard) in such a way that I hoped others would respond to me in a like manner and carry on some form of role-playing action between our creatures. I participated in these communities until I was around 14 years old but eventually stumbled upon animal simulation games. These games allowed the user to simulate the ownership of an animal and write in details for that animal, take care of it with regularity (or it would get mad), and present the little guy to other users in an appealing way.

Through this I even self-learned how to photo-manipulate to create customized profile pictures for myself and various digital fauna I decided to own. I could moderately work the features of the GIMP editing program until one day it stopped opening and, well, there went that pursuit. I could still recall my self-taught trainings as Photoshop comes quite easily to me, but I miss GIMP. In conjunction with these animal-simulation games and photo manipulations, I was also editing my friends pictures on MySpace for street-cred. I self-learned how to saturate the hell out of their already bright band tees, recolor their hair, color in certain parts of the photo while leaving others black and white, and everyone’s favorite, enhancing eyes.

After graduating high school, social medias, and editing programs, I woke up to discover I was in a dorm room with a Journalism major and Sociology minor. Now what? Okay, I’ll admit it, I dicked around my freshman year. My anxiety kept me from walking into the student newspaper and my new found freedom took me on a ride. I’m overall certain I learned nothing my freshman year except how to annoy people in the dining hall.

Let’s fast forward to winter my sophomore year. I’m sitting in the student newspaper’s office listening to a presentation on the benefits of participating. I could take pictures, write feature stories, write reviews (something I had originally checked journalism to do), and send my clips to future employers. I was sold. I realized quickly I needed to take this initiative and I did. Marisa joined The News Record.

I started, surprisingly, with photojournalism. There has always been a hankering in the depths of my mind to delve into some photography, but without a camera, I poked into writing. As chance had it, my uncle gave me a Canon EOS 10D for Christmas after learning I was a journalism major, and I began taking on photo assignments from my editor at The News Record with blind eagerness. I finished out my sophomore year in college with a flurry of published photos behind me.

At the start of my junior year, I remembered how much I initially wanted to be a writer. I have always felt my opinions on movies and music on the more refined side for my age, and with the anxiety of talking to people around office gone, I put my name in for a new entertainment feature writer. During autumn and winter quarter, I simultaneously wrote and photographed but my camera’s outdated technology was quickly becoming unable to match the direction I wanted to go. Although I had applied for my first photojournalism internship with the local entertainment publication CityBeat, my Canon was not about to survive a day longer, and I came into ownership of a Nikon D5000. I took up the photojournalism internship at CityBeat with pride and determination for the remainder of spring quarter. In the summer of 2012, I took up an internship with a local arts and culture publication in western North Carolina, Rapid River Magazine. I photographed many art galleries and interviewed local businesses around the area.

Currently, I’m in Cincinnati getting ready to graduate in April. I’ve solidified my journalism education in magazine writing, photojournalism and copy editing. I intern with UC Magazine as a writer, am helping the Yellowbook magazine get off the ground and work off and on with The News Record in the entertainment, college living, and photojournalism. I also contributed to Verge Magazine (thevergemagazine.org) Autumn semester 2012. (And I’m now using a Nikon D7000.)

Also, here’s a link to an old album where I put some of my earliest edits. Figured it would be an interesting glimpse at the past: Old Flickr Album link