overload

Okay so two posts in a day might be a little excessive for me especially following the novel that I posted earlier. But I’m currently feeling sick and am laying on my couch completely bundled up and bored. Therefore I have nothing else to do except dig up old pictures on my Flickr that I took in the time that I stopped posting on my blog and the time that i picked it back up again.  So here you go.

a triumphant return

So it’s definitely been over a year now since I last posted. I’m not really sure why. Life got in the way I guess. Maybe someone told me blogging was stupid. I’m not sure. But either way I’m back. Mostly to give myself an outlet to rant and engage in some petty narcissism by posting photographs I’ve taken.

When I began this blog over a year ago, I didn’t want to have a strict photoblog…after all I have a Flickr. I wanted an outlet for rants and thoughtful writing paired with my photography. I think maybe now, even more than I could last year, that will be possible. I’ve really been pushing myself this year with my photography. I took a road trip from Portland, Ore. to Los Angeles, CA in June and documented every stop on the way. I’ve just kept going ever since, whether my work was for myself, my photojournalism class last semester or my university’s newspaper.

One of my personal goals I’ve been trying to work on the last few months has been to take a closer look at my surroundings.  Now, that might seem pretty basic for photography but for me its been a drastic difference in my work and what I aim to do.  I’ve been dissecting everything around me…all the layers and the minute details. Focusing on the tiniest aspect of a scene in the forest or the beach or the middle of a crowd in a demonstration and making it beautiful and compelling. Not only has it changed and shaped my photography, it’s also changed my thinking. Each day I continue to push myself to focus on the details of the big picture. The how and the why and the interconnectedness of it all.

So anyway. I guess that’s an overview of what will come in the future, be it artistic photography or photojournalism. Get excited.

[click pictures to link to Flickr page]

Introduction/The reason my camera now hates me

I’ve been meaning to start a photoblog forever. I’m not entirely sure why. I think I’m just a complete narcissist who can’t be satisfied with having 200 photos on a flickr account, I need to add words to go along with them as well.

Maybe this goes against the nature of photography…or goes along with it but I kind of hate that I planned this blog. I waited…specifically until I got back from a week-long trip to Washington D.C. in order to have some new material to post. It just seems a little contrived to me…but I can’t deny that I did end up with a lot of interesting photos and thoughts from my trip.

Anyways here’s some snapshots of the District:

Saw this guy at the National Zoo…normally I’m not a huge fan of zoos. I like to think it’s pretty hypocritical for a country that values freedom so much to deny it to any other creature. The DC zoo was actually the first one I’d been to in years after I stopped going to the Oregon Zoo. Despite this…it and the fall colors did make for some pretty nice shots.

One of the funniest thing about my trip to D.C. was that it was pretty much unplanned. I went for a two day conference on political journalism but the majority of the seven days I was in the city, my friends and I had no idea what we would do. Our one mission when we left was to find a Panda Express, instead we only found this guy.

Saw these people reading the headlines from November 5th’s newspapers at the Newseum. History in the making.

Here’s something I wrote for my school paper recently about these two particular walls and their messages:

“Change is in the air in Washington D.C. Social change, physical change, and most notably, the so-called “regime change” that will take place on President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration day.

The atmosphere of change surrounded me everywhere I went; street vendors hawked Obama memorabilia under falling leaves as passersby stepped on discarded McCain-Palin stickers stuck to the sidewalk. It was a powerful metaphor to say the least.

Even with the coming of the Obama Administration and the transition from fall to winter, change is nothing new in this city. The District is a place where change is literally in it’s roots. As Obama said in his Democratic National Convention speech, “change doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.”

The city itself is an homage to change. A creation of a democracy that was literally revolutionary in it’s time, memorials that honor men and women and wars that changed the world and the course of human history. All can be found in it’s history.

The connection between changes old and new didn’t really hit me until I visited the Newseum, an entire museum dedicated to the history of news in every form. Amongst the displays of events that symbolically represented change, the most striking to me was simply the word “change” graffitied on a section of the Berlin Wall.

The connection between that simple message written almost 20 years ago, written now on the global message wall to Obama in front of the Lincoln Memorial, was powerful to say the least.

It reminded me that “change” isn’t just this election’s winning campaign slogan. It’s not something we sometimes mindlessly chant, without knowing what exactly we’re striving for. Change is something that we’ve been working towards–and sometimes against–throughout the course of human history. At it’s very core, change, no matter what it’s purpose, is timeless.

”

Seeing this wall and this piece of one of the Twin Towers at the Newseum also made a huge impact on me. Although I was all the way across the country in Portland, Oregon and a mere 6th grader when 9/11 happened, I remember every detail of that day. I remember my dad waking me up early to see the news. I remember wondering what exactly the Twin Towers were. I remember getting to school and people running through the halls shouting, “we’re all going to die!” I remember the assembly we had that day. I remember writing about about my feelings. I remember people who had relatives in New York frantically calling everyone they knew. I remember walking home from school and my mom walking halfway to meet me, something she’d never done before. I remember the day the world changed. Something I think we forgot though, over time is how real this all was, especially those of us who didn’t lose anyone in the tragedy. So much of it has turned into political fodder and entire anniversary specials to boost TV ratings. I’ve never been to Ground Zero. I’m sure it would have impacted me a lot more than this mere piece of bent and twisted metal, but I can’t say that I didn’t almost cry. Seeing these headlines up on the wall, and projections of pictures of that day behind the piece of the tower…was much more than a good photo op. It put everything into perspective.

For more pictures of my trip you can visit my Flickr