Ryan Hedstrom is a professor at the University of New England, and he is a Veteran of the Air Force. Hedstrom served in the military with his brain over his boots on the ground. Hedstrom graduated high school in 1990 and he received a full-tuition scholarship from WPI in the Engineering program through Air Force ROTC. He spent a year and a half at WPI and he was unable to keep his grade point average to the standards of the Air Force. The deal was that he had to either pay back the tuition money that the ROTC gave him or he had to enlist in the Air Force for two years. He then went to UMaine Farmington for 3 years under an education deferment and after he graduated UMF, he reported to basic training on the 4th of July in 1995. He was deployed to the hot summer sun of Texas, where Hedstrom said he was broken down mentally as a person, but then was built back up by the end of boot camp. After getting through the grime and intensity of basic training, he went to a technical school for his Air Force job. After going through schooling he was sent to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford Massachusetts. He then went on to serve active duty for 2 years but was never deployed. He served two years so that he could fulfill his obligation to the Air Force. After his two years of service, the Air Force paid for all of his schoolings. Hedstrom’s story is such a great story for so many people to see. There seems to be a lot of people who think to go into the military means you are going to war. That is true in cases of a lot of people, but there are hundreds and thousands of people who are behind the scenes on the computers and in the background making everything work. Hedstrom is an incredibly smart man for a lot of reasons. For one, he recognized at a young age that school is expensive and that it takes a lot for a family to send their child to college. To get a great education, Hedstrom took it upon himself to join the Air Force, so he could go to school for free. Not to mention he was in the engineering field which is one of the most difficult fields to be in. To be a technician and computer scientist in the Air Force, someone has to not only be extremely smart and mentally tough but also physically tough. Hedstrom’s story is a story I am proud to cover because it is a great story of a man who wanted to go to school and help his family and himself, he joined the Air Force and served our country proudly.

Official Course Description: In this course composition through framing and recognition will be introduced. Students will learn the relationship of pictorial structure to content and explore photography and video as media for research and expression. Static, sequential and web imaging will be examined and compared. 
3.000 Credit hours 

Own Description: In this course, students learned how to use DSLR cameras and adobe editing software to capture photographs. Through the course assignments and projects, students will be challenged to express themselves and explore. All types of photos will be analyzed and edited for presentation to the class.

Reflection: The chosen sample above is from my Intro to Image Capture class. We had a photojournalistic assignment on veterans. The task was to go and have a conversation with any veteran and ask them about there time in service and photograph them while they were talking to capture the scene and their emotion. I sat down with Professor Ryan Hedstrom and listened to his story about serving in the Air Force. This body of work shows my ability to capture a conversation and document it in a journalistic form. What I learned from this project was how to tell somebody else story and capture their story and write it down for others to hear. It was a great learning experience because in most writing assignments I have to write about myself or write about something I read. For this assignment, I was able to write about someone else and document somebody else voice. This sample is meaningful to the Image Capture course because it demonstrates the ability to capture a scene or a story with real emotion. The main goal from the course was to capture images for their emotion and their story, and with this assignment, we had to demonstrate the ability to capture someone’s story and emotion not only with images, but for this specific assignment with word documentation as well.