From the Naples News in Florida:Matt Milligan (pictured) has a natural eye for photography.
He doesn’t have the hand for it, but patience and that natural eye more than help him make up for it.
Matt, 13, was born with ataxic cerebral palsy. Doctors told his parents he might never walk.
“I have trouble with my fine motor skills,” says Matt, a Bonita Springs home school student. “Sometimes my hands shake, so I want an image stabilization lens (for his camera).”
Matt finds ways around his shaky hands, though. He takes lots of photos of the same subject, knowing at least one will turn out, and uses a monopod.
“Before he got his monopod, we were his tripod,” says his mom, Lisa Milligan. “We’d stand there and hold our hands under his arms.”
Matt’s foray into photography has been quite an odyssey. His first experience was at the age of 9 with a 35-mm camera at his brother’s graduation from flight school.
“I asked my dad, ‘Since you guys have a digital now, could I have the Minolta 35?’ ” Matt says.Once the photos were processed, Matt says, his parents realized his photos outstripped their own.
“When we came back from that trip with the photography, we said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Lisa Milligan says with a laugh.
Lisa and her husband, Mark, knew when he was born he would have a tough road ahead of him. But between excelling at long-distance running with the Special Olympics and delving headlong into his photography, Matt has surprised everyone, including his parents.
“We just look at him in awe,” Lisa Milligan says. “He’s an inspiration. When he was born, we didn’t know what was going to be wrong with him. We were amazed when he learned how to ride a bike.”
Now, when Matt is not doing school work, he spends his afternoons exploring his neighborhood and the beaches of north Collier County and Bonita Springs. It is a young photographer’s dream to grow up in an area overflowing with wildlife, wilderness and stunning coastal sunsets.
Some of the photos he takes require little more than for him to step out his front door.
But his one-time photography teacher, Garth Francis, says Matt’s skills go beyond simple luck with his subjects.
“He demonstrated amazing skills, not only for his age, but also for some of the issues he deals with,” said Francis. “I was very impressed with what he came back with, just after the first class.”
Francis said when he taught Matt a year ago, Matt was his youngest student ever — by about 40 years. And many of the retirees in Francis’ photography class were equally amazed by what Matt did.
“But, what was interesting was he just had one question after another,” said Francis.
At one point, Francis said he turned to ask the rest of the class if they had any questions because he was concerned Matt might be taking away time from other students.
“And one woman said, ‘No, let him ask. He’s asking all of the questions I can’t even think to ask,’” Francis said.
Matt has started to gain recognition in the Bonita Springs community for his work, showing it at the Bonita Springs Art League, and most recently, at the February Side Street Artists Show in Bonita. His work was shown at the 52nd annual Art in the Park show in downtown Naples March 7.
“He just had an eye,” says Lisa Milligan. “So, we did a couple of classes at the art league and he entered the shows and he got in.”
Matt says he would love to turn his passion into a career — he gets inspired by the work he sees in National Geographic magazine and is interested in becoming a news photographer. Francis says the goal is a realistic one.
“I think the sky would be the limit for him,” Francis says. “The only thing that might plague him is just simply his age.”
For now, though, Matt is keeping it homegrown.
“I would like to do a fundraiser show for, like, the Shelter for Abused Women and Children, Habitat for Humanity or the Special Olympics,” Matt said.