Positive People in Pinecrest – Elly Schnau

Positive People in Pinecrest - Elly Schnau
Positive People in Pinecrest - Elly Schnau
Elly Schnau

The Silver Knight nominee in Art from Palmetto High School is Elly Schnau. Schnau is a photography student who took photography when attending the Southwood Middle Arts Magnet.

At Palmetto, Schnau is in the highest-level photography class and is developing a portfolio that could enable her to go to an arts college.

However, she’s recently found a love for science and medicine so she’s looking for a regular university to go into pre-med.

Her concentration this year is a fun recreation of film stills featuring her two younger sisters. She looks for stills that inspire her.

“I’ve done some from the movie Psycho, the Shining and Boyhood,” she says. Her sisters have been cooperative for the most part. “The younger does enjoy being a little model but the older one needs some convincing when I need to do some shooting. I’ve been working with them for since sixth grade. Whenever I needed a model, I just chose the ones I had in the house. They both have interesting faces.”

She decided on re-creating the movie stills because she needed something she wouldn’t get bored with and that there were enough that she’d never run out of ideas.

“There are millions of movies,” she says. “I’ve always been fascinated with film, going to the movies, seeing how they film it, using camera angles to see who they create emotions in the film. I thought this was a perfect project for me.”

Her Silver Knight project took place in the Miami Rescue Mission.

“I came up with it because I’d been working and volunteering, several times through the years and I’d built a relationship with that community,” she says.

She took pictures at Miami Rescue Mission events and she incorporated the children she’s worked with.

“I asked if I could hang out with the children and show them how the camera works, and let the children use the camera,” she says. “Then print out the photos and let them see what they created. I wanted to give them a sense of accomplishment.”

While she’s not going to major in photography in college, she’d love to study photography and maybe go so far as to minor in it.

“Now that my focus is medicine, it’s going to be difficult to dedicate as much time as I do now to it,” she says.

She is president of the Palmetto’s photo club.

“That takes up most of my time,” she says.

Schnau is a member of the Eight Habits of the Heart club.

“Every early release Thursday we go to the freshman English classes and we discuss with them one of the eight habits of the heart, such as brotherhood, honesty, bravery or trust, core values.”

Her switch from photography to medicine as a career came about when she took anatomy as an elective.

“Our teacher is so amazing, that when I heard were going to learn the basic bones of the body, I was excited,” she says. “I found myself to be really excited to learn those things and how people can use that information to fix people. My focus is surgery. With the idea, you can cut out the part that makes people sick and that’s it.”

Now she spends much of her free time coloring in her anatomy book and learning what the body can do. She says she knows it’s a weird extracurricular activity but says it’s good for her.

Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld


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