 Camera: Canon PowerShot S500, Taken: 12.11.04 @ 4:49 p.m., Exp: 1/80 sec. F/4, Altered w/: Photoshop The View in question is that of the Santa Susana Mountains as seen from the third floor window of Sherman Oaks hospital. It's poignant because lying a few feet from me was my Grandmother, three days after being diagnosed with stomach cancer. I felt nothing but despair when I went to the window and saw this view. Stomach cancer represented a death sentence for my Grandmother. My mother died of stomach cancer nearly eight years prior, so this was like deja vu all over again. There was little hope, and what little faith I had in a benevolent God was washed away in the tears I shed in the days following the diagnosis. As I stood there I took my camera out and tried to capture the wonder I felt as I looked out the window, because all I could fell was sorrow. I hoped to capture the beauty of that moment and someday look back and actually appreciate it. Strange how life is so full of contrasts such as life and death, misfortune and windfall. This picture now represents the duality of these things to me. It is my personal yin and yang symbol, representing the joy and misery found in this life. It's a wonderful combination, coexisting in equal amounts. Sadly many of us only register agony and forget to cherish the absolutely astonishing. For even in the moment I took this picture I felt the overwhelming desire to experience the emotions I felt completely and without reservations. I wanted to feel that sorrow to the full extent of the word. I wanted to experience that anguish so that I could one day feel an equal amount of joy. I remembered the words of Richard Nixon at that moment, and embraced my anguish. "Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain."  Camera: Canon PowerShot S500, Taken: 10.7.05 @ 11:42 a.m., Exp: 1/13 sec. F/2.8, Altered w/: Photoshop Porthole Hallway is a picture I took on a visit to my old school, Santa Monica College. I spent a few years, on and off, on that campus. Being a nostalgic fellow, stepping onto the campus only a year after last taking a class there felt, in a word, nice. My eyes must have been like saucers, looking and trying to take in what used to be just common to me. Things I had see hundreds of times now had this air of nostalgia. The "porthole" in question is a window in a door on the second level of what used to be called the Tech building, but is now known as Dreschler Hall. When I first got into the photography program at SMC the photography lab/studio was in the basement of the old Science building. Soon after the Northridge earthquake it was moved to the second floor of the tech building. The studios there were carved out of what looked to be the remains of a nearly gutted second floor. It's strange to think that I took pictures in the studio that would later be gutted and turned into the room where I took my last English class at SMC. The hallway in the picture was where the old studio hallway used to be. The nice interior wasn't like that years ago. It was a dusty hallway with signs warning of opening certain doors. Today it's a crossroads for students moving from class to class, and right in the middle there's a photo gallery. The area represents a bit of its former history in that photo gallery. When I went to the gallery on this day I turned around and saw what is represented in the picture. The porthole represented the distance from those days, and the distance between me and that school. Because even though I can visit it any time I wish, I'm no longer a student there. Any visit now represents just that, a visit, not an actual purpose in being there. I now see the school through the filter of a visitor, able to see what's going on, but not really being a part of it. |