BELFAST —On the hallway gallery wall of Waterfall Arts in Belfast, where student work hung a month ago, one striking photograph stood out. An older man stares, his gaze transfixed. Tayler Nickerson took that photo of her father. It is a pensive photo and her camera lens captures something elusive in his stare.  Asked what was going on in his mind when she took that photo, she said: “He was just watching a golf tournament. That’s the look he gets when he’s watching it.”

So much for Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.

“The assignment was to use tilt shift, where you focus on one part of the photo, in this case, his eyes, and it shifts the focus to make the rest of the photo blurry,” she said.

Using her father and friends, as well as herself as subjects, she became interested in pursuing photography last year when the Belfast High School offered a photography class. This year, due to a shortage of students signing up, however, the class was no longer offered.

It didn’t matter. Tayler used her camera to explore more techniques on her own. She realized she was really drawn to taking landscape photos. While riding in the car with her mother in Frankfort one day, the vivid green grass and trees by a river caught her eye, so she asked her mother to stop the car. Retrieving her camera, she laid down in the grass and aimed her lens at a particular spot.

“I like taking photos from the perspective of the ground, because people don’t usually see things from that view, so I probably looked weird,” she said. “I angled it, took it and when I edited it, I really enhanced the green, because that’s the way I saw it.”

Another landscape photo taken in Frankfort bumps up the blue of the river. Composition wise, this one was taken while the car was moving.

“I noticed how the intense the blue of river pulled in the green from the trees,” she said.

Unlike the other one, she didn’t have to enhance this photo.

Playing around with technique is one of her favorite ways to explore. As part of another previous assignment she set up a shot outdoors at midnight with her friends to do a “light painting.”

“How it works is we stood there with glow sticks and set the timer on the camera. I extended the exposure of the camera and we looked kind of crazy just flinging the lights around, but you can’t see what you’re drawing until afterwards.”

Like her photos, she has a loose plan of what she wants to accomplish—but is open to other possibilities to see how it all turns out.

“After I graduate, I’m taking a gap year,” she said. “I’m thinking of getting a couple of jobs and then taking some more photography classes through Waterfall Arts. And then I’m hoping after that year, I’ll be going to Maine College of Art.”

And that’s what they call “the bigger picture.”

Hail To The Rad Kids is an ongoing series highlighting Midcoast teens with artistic talent.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com