It didn’t take Katelyn Cooper long to find her passion.

When she was only 3, her parents put a Fisher Price camera in her hands.

The camera would capture her imagination.

“I started lining up and taking perspective shots,” said Katelyn, an Auburn Mountainview High School freshman. “Then (my parents) realized, ‘She’s going to be a photographer.'”

What Wes and Nicole couldn’t have known was the level of commitment to the craft, specifically nature photography, their only child would develop.

“We didn’t show her how to take any of the pictures, but she had promise,” said Wes, an avid amateur photographer.

Now, at the age of 14, Katelyn has become an accomplished, award-winning photographer. She has travelled throughout the Western States, France and China to capture images, mostly of nature.

In July she and her father sailed to the Galápagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, where Katelyn got to fine-tune her skills with photographers from National Geographic, a magazine Katelyn aspires to work for one day.

“We travelled to multiple islands, working with National Geographic photographers who were giving us advice on site. It was amazing,” she said of the weeklong trip. “It was really nicer than the usual way of taking the picture, and them telling you, ‘Oh, if you had moved over here, or over there,'” she said. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, I can’t go back and get the better picture.'”

For some, the thrill of a trip to the islands made famous as the laboratory of Charles Darwin – naturalist and author of “On the Origin of Species”, where he explained his theory of evolution – would last a lifetime.

Not for Katelyn.

The young photographer has her mind set on publishing a book, “U.S. National Parks: Picturing the Little Things”, so she’ll be pointing her lens at wildlife and nature at several national parks next summer.

“Most people go to the national parks and they look at the big picture,” she said. “They don’t take the time to see the little things, the things beside the trails, the animals or the flowers. We want to go and take pictures of the things people don’t notice, with a little excerpt so they can learn about it. And after they can go and visit the parks and look for those things. It deepens the appreciation and the respect and understanding of the parks.”

To fund the trip, Katelyn is selling various prints of her photos and waging a Kickstarter campaign to solicit donations.

“This is giving me the experience of pitching an idea and going out on assignment, like you would for a magazine like National Geographic,” she said. “That’s the reason we came up with to do the Kickstarter.”

According to Wes, the family will spend a month this summer traveling to 20 national parks in Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming to capture the images for the book.

“I’m most excited to go to Yosemite because of the history,” Katelyn said. “(My parents) had their honeymoon there, so I’ve heard tons of stories about Yosemite and want to see it for myself.”

If any money from the $9,000 Kickstarter goal is left over, Wes said it will go toward Katleyn’s other passion, traveling.

Katelyn plans to save enough money to attend The Traveling School as a junior.

“It’s a semester long and you take whatever you’re learning in that semester and move it to another country,” Katelyn said of the program. “The one I want to do is in South Africa and Mozambique. It adds another element to learning.”

She added:

“For me, (traveling) makes it so you’re not just one-sided in your views,” Katelyn said. “You have a whole bunch of other experiences that you’ve seen and you’ve lived for a couple of weeks, or a couple of days. You don’t feel like America is the only culture out there. There are so many more cultures out there. It gives you a bigger picture of the world.”

For her parents, it’s all an opportunity for Katelyn to get a leg up when she embarks on her chosen career as a photographer after college.

“This is the route she wants to go, so we’re getting her as many skills and experiences she can get to help her,” Wes said. “We’ve gotten her certified as a climber so can go out and climb. She’s in search and rescue with me now. She knows backcountry skiing and about avalanche danger, those kinds of things.

“(We want her to have) as many skills that will set her apart from the other thousands of photographers out there, so she can go to Antarctica and dive under the ice or climb and take pictures in the high rainforest,” Wes said. “Just giving her those skill sets and just trying to give her as much of a comfort level traveling and experiencing other cultures as we can.”

For more information on Katelyn Cooper, or to view and buy her photos visit http://www.rhythmicrain.com/ or http://instagram.com/rhythmic_rain_photography/. To contribute to her Kickstarter campaign visit www.kickstarter.com/projects/122656130/us-national-parks-picturing-the-little-things