Sharon Jacobs Has Fun with Photography
Anderson Artists Guild member Sharon Jacobs got hooked on photography early. “My parents gave me a little Brownie camera for Christmas one year,” she said. “I loved it. I took pictures of everything, even if there was no film in the camera.”
A Chicago native, she started night school at Northwestern University while working full time as a secretary at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and eventually completed a degree in graphic arts years later. “But I’m still drawing stick people, so it never did me a bit of good,” she said.
Her husband was in the Navy, so she followed him around the country—from multiple locations in California to Rhode Island, Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia. “I loved moving around,” she said. “My favorite place was wherever I was living at the time.”
They relocated to Seneca, S.C., for his post-Navy job with Duke Power, then retired in Anderson, where Jacobs remained after her husband died in 1997. For a while, she worked in real estate—in sales and as a loan originator and as a credit analyst—before retiring when the housing industry imploded. Her military involvement continues through her participation as secretary of the Military Officers Association in Anderson.
One of her passions is travel. She serves as the secretary of the Anderson Travel Club and has taken trips to France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, Belize, Ireland, and Colombia, as well as throughout the U.S.
Always along is her Samsung Galaxy S9 cell phone, which she uses as a camera. “I never had a big camera with lenses,” she said. “I didn’t want to drag it around, especially when traveling in a group. Trying to use a tripod is almost impossible. And the Samsung takes awesome photos.” Previously, she used Lumix Samsung Galaxy 2 cameras.
She photographs “anything that doesn’t move.” Her favorite shot happened during a fall evening walk in Charleston. “The sun was setting, and the lights in the gardens of the houses were coming on. I saw a beautiful back garden through a wrought-iron fence with a lovely colorful scene,” she said. Another favorite, taken at an alligator farm, shows brave turtles using the back and snout of a sleeping alligator as a place to nap. Another was an accidental shot of a yellow bird on a plant on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
She prints her photos at Walgreens, CVS or Strickland Fine Art, usually in 11 x 14-inch sizes. She has sold a few and won a $100 merit award at a juried show at the Anderson Arts Center. “I just play at photography,” she insists. “It’s fun.”
