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.