Shops

I took a one week trip to Beijing in early January. It was mostly to see my grandfather, but to be honest, most of my time was spent wandering various arts districts with a cousin, my sister, and my dad. I kind of have a thing about not taking pictures of pictures because I think it's tacky, so I spent most of my time creating pictures of my own...which usually means stalking unaware strangers and searching for colorful things in the dark.

Happy Chinese New Year. Not really relevant, but these pictures are from China, and both lunar and solar new years have passed.

Fire (San Diego, CA; 11/2010)

Birthdays & Abducting Friends (San Diego, CA; 11/2010)

Meg's Wedding - Before (The Poconos, PA; 06/2010)

I'm having some trouble pulling together all the wedding pictures into an engaging visual narrative.

It's difficult because I realize that, more often than not, I don't treat picture-taking as a journalistic endeavor. Usually, something just catches my attention and I'm soon fixated and snapping away in an attempt to capture it. This produces a lot of random images of many random things that don't always tell a story. The lighting in each photo is different, as are the composition and the subjects. All that said, it's been taking a little extra long time tweaking with Gimp (long live open source!) to pull together a visually cohesive story with what I got over the weekend.

I like to blame this a few things:

1) the aforementioned obsession with taking lots and lots pictures of many random things
2) technical shortcomings, like my non-SLR lens that isn't always able to capture moments fast enough, depending on the lighting (a poor excuse that's quite possibly an attempt at justifying the purchase of a new camera)
3) my actual participation IN the wedding, which kept me from really taking on the role of a good historian
In any case, it was a beautiful wedding with beautiful people nestled in the beautiful Poconos mountains.

Stalking the homeless. (Barcelona, Spain; 2/2009)

I saw a homeless man sleeping in the middle of the Gothic Quarter at 4 in the afternoon. Was it creepy of me to stand there taking pictures of him for 20 minutes as people walked by?