Over and Over

This is where I would return to over and over and over, overcome by sickness...

Loads of Fun

I spent most of the day on that chair, with that laptop, and those rosary beads, typing up a twenty page paper. Loads of fun...

The Killing Book

I thought I should give a special place in my pictures to the book that killed me all weekend because its taking forever to read and even longer to study.

Five

Five in the morning, the day begins. But this is a day of sickness and studying, a bad combination, and an uneventful combination, but its important to make familiar things new.

Satisfaction

Nothing like licking your plate after a good meal! Haha

The Remnants

Olive Oil

Crock Pot

Assortment

I think this needs to be touched up in black and white.

La Mano

Torn Building

Mystery

Reflections

The Gate

Waterfalling

The mist creating by the waterfall was both intense and spectacular -- cold and crisp. It created such an enormous mist storm that I didn't even realize when it started to rain, and in addition to that, its not everyday that you get to go swimming in a waterfall in a rainforest... so I was oblivious to the passing rain...afterall, it was a rainforest.

At the Pier

Digitally remastered, the photo that took a million years to shoot, is finally finished. I was staring through the side of the Pier at black cats crawling about the stones that lined the beach here. It was a relaxing night.

Mountainous Rainforest

Some experiences are too breathtaking to explain. So we take pictures! It rained every twenty minutes in this rainforest...so, as you can guess from the clouds on the right... I had to take it fast.

Colors of the Rainbow

I told him to face the door because I didn't want his face to distract from the attention I wanted to draw to the patterns of colors, and at the same time, the oddness of his stance gave the picture more character than I bargained for...

La Concha

La Concha...a lavish resort, a casino wonderland with a beach for those late night walks when we would meditate on what we would do since we lost so much at the slots...

Conquistadors

The conquistadors built this great wall to protect the island of Puerto Rico from intruders -- pirates and all...it is a lasting testament to a great navigating people. A special memory in the history of Puerto Rico, and a special memory captured in a picture for me...

La Bandera

The Puerto Rican flag became for us a symbol of youth, life, beauty, culture, art -- in short, everything that made Puerto Rico the rich diversified experience that it was. The red white and blue of the flag blended beautifully with the tropical colors of the various buildings that lined the streets of Old San Juan. It gave the district a vibrant feeling, and the feeling seemed to be in everyone and everything...

At the Pier

This is a self-portrait that took a million years to set up and one million mores years just to get right. Even then, I'm not sure if I got it right, but it was fun playing with this angle because in terms of photography its something that I rarely if ever do...

Atlantic Beach Hotel

There was just something about this miniature palm tree that was asking for a picture. There was an indefinable something about the Atlantic Beach Hotel, something classic, something classy, something beautiful enough to be worthy of a portrait. I just don't know what it was exactly..but whatever it was, it made for a good photo

Waterfalls & Rainforests

Four days ago I was here, deep in the El Yunque Rainforest of Puerto Rico. The whole area was exquisite -- a spectacular natural scenery to go swimming in, and that's exactly what we did. It was like a postcard moment. :-)

City Lights

I think Charlie Chaplin has a film by the same name of my title. There is, I think, something about city lights that is truly beyond the description of words, so with that said, I'll keep quiet...pictures speak louder than words [well, not really, but...]

Satires of Life

I was thinking, wondering, what power does photography have to make statements? This picture, for instance, is visually trying to make a statement about how we sometimes put things of lesser value ahead of things of greater value. The word "Pepsi" near the center hopefully has a bit of a satirical effect :-)

Film Noir

I was thinking of the cinematic beauty of 1940's film noir. This picture, by its very nature, could easily be a shot from the Maltese Falcon, Double Idemnity, Elevator to the Gallows, the 39 Steps, etc. It's as if a man were on a sidewalking secretly peering into windows to gather evidence, or simply to keep watch on a suspect. The things that detectives see would make for great photographs...

Towering

There is something intriguing about standing beneath a structure like this and look up at it. It's has a truly towering effect, and from time to time you wonder if the building is going to fall on you while you're taking pictures of it. ...My goal was to capture something of that towering, colossal presence through the use of this angle.

Francophone Girl

This was taken two nights ago, a portrait of a francophone twin girl with aspirations to reach the stars one day. She told me that the title of my picture was "Boredom." So I would like to tell everyone that the title of my picture is "Boredom." But, if I could have my way the title, the theme of the picture, would be "Gaze." It's almost like one of those intense Calvin Klein commercials, except in color. I liked the contrast between the brown of her skin, the black clothes with the bright green hat. Have you ever gotten the feeling that, while you look through your camera at someone to take a picture, they are not simply looking at the camera or posing for the camera, but looking at you? Sometimes I want to say, "Why are you staring at me?"

Shy Girl

The theme here was shyness; she shook whenever the lense made contact with her eyes. We were out at the Harrington Hotel, and the place was so bustling with people during the day that we needed to wait till the sun set just to steal a piece of solitude from the city. Yet, the problem with the shaking and smiling and self-consciousness in front of camera persisted, so I said, "Turn right and just look down..." You can still see apprehension behind the threads of hair. Her eyes look vacant as if lost in thought, and I kind of like to imagine that the blurriness of the background reflects that. The backgrond is surreal, as if the world were in motion around her the way it was in motion within her own mind. But let's not get too poetic...yet...

Portraits

I think it was Samuel Johnson who said that true creativity lies not only in making new things familiar, but familiar things new. So I confined myself to CUA's campus, around the Shrine and Michigan Avenue, and somehow landed in Gibbons. I went looking for portraits -- landscapes bored me, but the faces of friends did not. It's great when you catch people mis-en-scene, completely unaware that a photographer has found them in a perfect pose until the camera flashes. Those are the moments that will never come again

Skewed

Isn't the framing of this photo a little bit off? It is. It's an easy thing to fix on Photoshop, but I chose not to, since the framing of it fits well with the content of the photo. I must say that I'm glad you, the reader, weren't standing where I was standing to take this shot so I wouldn't wake the old man up. The stench of his urine around the metro made the picture skewed as the camera shook in my hand. But I had to take the picture. The scene had a captivating irony about it: a homeless man with nowhere to go in between two luxurious cars owned by people who both had somewhere to go -- and there the homeless guy was, right in the middle. A natural composition. I hate the fact that I call it natural. Why is this natural?? Even more than what that says about him, what does it say about us...? About me? I'm still trying to grasp it....it's all so skewed.

Before the Beginning

I wasn't able to get the SLR camera just yet, but for the sake of experimenting with grayscales, saturation, etc. on Photoshop I decided to take a few preliminary photographs.

The first is a cheap imitation of a photo taken with an SLR by a cameraman I know in Bombay, India. The clarity and angle of the photo, which he took while looking through a mirror, was phenomenal.



Portraits are fascinating -- the capturing of a thought in motion across a face, and its potential for being true art, whether an actual image [left] or a poster [right], is something that I hope to perfect. Thoughts on faces, in particular emotions or insights, are intriguing.




However, with all of this said, it must be emphasized that these pictures, taken in Brookland, represent preliminary stages of photography. The stage before the beginning.

Beginning at the End

Unfortunately the beginning is today. If it were last night, when I was in Adams Morgan, yesterday would have been the beginning and today I would be writing the end of that great story that happened around midnight. With no pictures to show for it, I'll keep silent. Suffice it to say that I should have had a blog on it, because it was a very picturesque night in a million and one unique, gritty, visceral, exciting and often unexpected ways. Fortunately, nights like that happen often in Washington, D.C.