Purple

I’ve been following along with the Isolation Journals writing prompts throughout Covid and here is a small piece about the color purple.

Purple is the laughter after your father told you bedtime stories when he was home from a business trip. He’d twist the unfortunate fate of grandma in Little Red Riding Hood into a tale of the dangers of heart burn and not packing the right tools in your basket; how humpty dumpty could fix himself with his Krazy Glue; how the three little pigs actually weren’t so little after all. It is the quiet smile you crack remembering these.

Purple is the weight of the polaroid, heavy between your fingers as you sift through boxes and boxes of unorganized pictures. It is the smell of your grandmother’s perfume trapped in a box with pictures of friends and family you have never met, but a gnawing warmth grows in your chest as you flip through the glossy stacks.

Purple is the first bite of plum, juicy and tart. Plums are always on the periphery – no one seems to go out of their way to eat with joy or purpose, a fruit that you snack on because someone else brought it, but you are not sure who. And though it is gently sweet, and holds back thirst, you want it to be more. The loud explosion of an orange, the crisp crunch of an apple, the burst of sweet juice as you plop another strawberry in your mouth. But all purple is the mellow taste of remembering something better.

Purple is the sweet smell of dew drops clinging to the grass in the early morning. It is the dampness of the fog on your face packing your car for a long journey ahead, eyes itchy with sleep and the lingering scent of damp asphalt, sighing at the relief of the early morning quiet.

Purple is the hazy memory you are grasping at in the back of your head. The name of the man you bought your car from or the hostess who sat you at the restaurant last week, the street of your childhood bully – hazy, shapeless, but on the tip of your tongue. You are sitting with friends, recounting the story of the worst date you have had but, can’t remember what you ate and though the detail is small, its accuracy is vital to the rest of your tale. It is the gnawing feeling of not wanting to forget, but slowly letting the memory fade.

I Just Want to Fly, Higher, Higher, Higher - April 2019

Bird is the Word

Wildlife and nature are the primary reasons I ever picked up a camera. When I was kid, every summer my parents packed my brother and into a minivan and drove the 12 hours to South Carolina where we spent a week resting on beaches and biking through salt marshes. I credit these trips with instilling a lot of my passion for environmentalism and conservation as I’d beg my parents to have us go out on naturalist led gator walks,  ocean seining and crabbing where they’d teach us about the ecosystem of the beach, barrier islands and all that was in between.

As I got older, I wanted a way to document the alligators, dolphins and natural world I loved so I picked up a camera.

On one of those trips I had my parents sign me up for a nature photography class where one of the guides took us out with our point and shoot cameras and laid out the basics of photography while showing us techniques to capture the natural world.

“If you ever want to practice shutter speed and moving targets. Go to the beach or a field. Watch the gulls. It trains you track better,” she said, as we watched some egrets roosting.

The natural world is still one of my favorite things to photograph, but I’ve focused a lot more on travel and street photography in the last few years.

I was cleaning up Lightroom last year when I realized the last time I went out to shoot was back in the fall to catch the foliage and needed to remedy that. So, the first nice day in April I grabbed my telephoto lens and headed down to Sandy Hook. I’ve always been told that harbor seals can be spotted, but have yet to spot any myself, so sand plovers and oyster catchers it was.

What I like most about this photo is that I can tell my tracking has improved from even a couple months beforehand.  I’m lucky in that a large, ecologically divers park is not too far from my work campus and during the summer and fall, can go out and look for snakes, turtles, frogs and birds (there are a lot of hawks in the area.) All of those lunch breaks leaning into reeds and trying to follow the flight path paid off as I could keep pace and just about guess where all of the seabirds were gliding too.

But also, I can say that it is a pretty decent wildlife shot. It might not be the most artistic or striking, but oyster catcher is in focus, the water is blurred, and I think it capture the feeling of flying pretty well – or at least what I imagine to be.

Brussels Vibes - March 2019

Dementors incoming in 3,2,1…

Brussels is a weird city.

It has one foot in dingy and one foot in delightful and the rest of its body bounces back and forth between the two camps like an inflatable waving guy on a car lot.  We had arrived at Gare di Mudi without much expectation as to what the Belgian capital offered and remained both pleasantly surprised and mildly uncomfortable for the three days my friend and I spent there between London and Amsterdam.

I think a visitor’s experience is entirely dependent on how they get to their accommodation. After an early morning train leaving from King’s Cross we arrived before noon without much of an idea of what we were walking into.  Leaving the station, I thought maybe there would be a few waffle stands and chocolate, but instead we passed vacant storefronts and trash in the streets. Our fellow train passengers dispersed into taxis and blahblah cars and excitement turned into anxiety as tried to navigate to the correct direct our hostel was in.

Used napkins, plastic bags, rotting fruits and vegetables tumbled down the empty streets in the breeze. Being two bearded white men offered a privilege walking through unknown streets, but we both gripped our osprey bags a bit tighter. Not guarded yet, but on alert.

And we weren’t the only one’s surprised.

We arrived at our hostel room and found six Canadians camped out on their beds. They looked like they hadn’t left the room in four days and when asked how they were enjoying Brussels, laughed and said, “Brussels is a shit hole,” before returning to their laptops to watch TV.

We dropped our bags, freshened up and went down to the hostel bar to decide on what to do. Andrew was ready to pack it in and head to the Netherlands that moment. He had already been traveling the UK and Europe for the last three months and this was his last leg before heading home, something he was anxious to do.

“It doesn’t even look like there is much to do here. A square, some museums and that’s it.”  His voice was curt and he was angry at my lack of research, just holding back a snap.

In the end, we spent our days wandering around Antwerp and Bruges before returning to Brussels during the evening and while Ditto recuperated at the hostel, I went out with my camera and fell in love with the city.

Any new place I travel, my camera is always beside me. I think one of the benefits of being a tourist and photographer is that you can focus on small moments people might miss in their everyday lives and I never want to miss them. Its part of the reason why I don’t spend nearly as much time shooting in NYC as I might – growing up in central New Jersey it was always a forty-minute train ride away. Easy, accessible and familiar it didn’t spark creativity the way a new city does.

When this photo was taken, the heat wave that was plaguing in Europe settled and all morning the sky looked like it was going to crack open, but the most it they did was ring out a couple drizzles like a wet towel. We just finished a lunch of waffles and fries and wanted to wander some more before returning to the hostel.  

What I like best about it is that it reminds of movement, being dynamic. The trolley car coming forward, the clouds anxiously sweeping across the city, the relaxed vibe of the people sitting. There are some edit changes I would make toward it now (brightening up the shadows a bit and increasing some range of colors), but the structure of the individual parts makes up for that.

It was only that night as I went back out to shoot again that my opinion shifted. Brussels, for all its fringe and smudge has a distinctive vibe absent in Antwerp and Bruges. Where those two cities sing their qualities, Brussels hums them.  If you take a second to look past the flurry of used waffle napkins it has an energy that vibrates from the buildings and street.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Philly, intimidating and a bit grimy, but a charm that grows on you.

I Freakin' Love Cows - February, 2019

Cows; Simple Not Static

My favorite picture that I posted in February was this profile of a cow I met in Ireland. After I finished walking the Cliffs of Moher, I was waiting for the bus back to Galway, which wouldn’t come for another half hour. Across the highway was a field and I noticed these two Canadians I shared the bus ride there petting these fine bovines that were just past a stone wall.

Doing my best frogger impersonation across the road, I joined them a few feet away and watched as they grabbed handfuls of grass to feed to these cows, who were eagerly rushing forward.  I ripped a patch of grass sprouting from the wall and held out my hand. Three seconds later a herd of cows was at my feet, willing models for a generous payment of grass.

During college, I basically stopped eating almost all red meat. My school’s cafeteria wasn’t terrible and burgers were always on the menu, but I always found it easier to just make a sandwich from the cold cuts instead of waiting in line; and by the time junior and senior year rolled around 80% of my diet was salads as I tried to lose weight. When I graduated and moved into my first apartment, I didn’t eat it because I couldn’t afford to. Living off of two internships and my then boyfriend’s job as a café manager didn’t leave a lot spare change to experiment with cooking so we stuck to pasta, eggs and in season vegetables.

After several years of abstaining the first time I ate a burger upset my stomach, but really I’ve stopped eating red meat because of the guilt.

Most of the television I watched as a kid was a mixture of Animal Planet and Discovery Channel, in the golden age of Steve Irwin, Jeff Corwin and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.  As such, pretty much every creature that inhabits the earth has  soft spot in my heart, but cows are just so fucking cute and friendly.

Not as fancy as horses, less political than pigs and smarter than chickens cows are the barnyard creature I’d want to be friends with. They’re comforting like that one nice acquaintance or neighbor who you aren’t super close with,but is always so nice to you when you see them and as such, I felt like an asshole eating them.  Despite being seen as a food commodity, research has show that cows have a high degree of emotional, social and cognitive complexity  that make them more than just a burger. They’re not the smartest creatures on the planet, but its been demonstrate that they aren’t just breathing lawn mowers.

In particular, I like the symmetry best in this one. Its an easy, balanced image and goes against the rule of centering your subject, but I really like the level of detail in it. The juxtaposition of one eye in shadow and in the light and the golden hour lighting from sun dipping closer to the horizon. It doesn’t require you to think too much and that makes me happy; simple but not static. Kind of like cows themselves.

All Is Calm, Dublin - January 2019

There were a lot of contenders for a favorite shot from January, but this one of Dublin along the Liffey River is the one I came back to the most.  The combination of symmetry, warm sunset light and washed out California vibes brings me a great sense of calm.

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Despite being one of the rainiest places, my weather in Dublin (barring the downpour I experienced on the first day) was fantastic and a perfect combination of a warm summer saying goodbye and a winter inching forward. Most of the time, the constantly shifting cloud cover made it great for changing light in the same spots creating different moments to capture and be challenged by. Ireland overall is very scenic, but Dublin in particular I feel is an underrated city for photographers.  No skyscrapers or a ton of districts to explore, just busy little streets hugged by three story buildings.

Traveling to Ireland was the first time I did something completely alone. I purchased the discounted ticket on a whim not long after coming back from a trip earlier in the year and it initially gave me unfettered joy to plan as it had been on my list to visit for ten years.  The months spent planning my route and which cities I wanted to explore excited me and gave me something to look forward to as the year drew to a close. Unfortunately, anxiety and depression have a habit of encroaching at the worst possible times.

A sexual assault about a month and half before take off triggered me slipping into a depressive episode. I spiraled thinking a lot about my life and all the parts I was unhappy with and how exhausted I was just trying to get through some days.  It felt like the world was just squeezing everything out of me and I couldn’t focus because I just didn’t care, leading to me  double-booking hostels and mistiming  trains while I tried to finalize my route.

On the day I left, I struggled with whether I should board the plane or just go home and crawl into bed.

“What’s wrong, you sound sad?” My mother asked. Her and my dad were visiting my brother in Boston. I could tell she was a little tipsy from some wine, but she could still tell when my headspace wasn’t right.

“I’m just a little tired from the drive.  Just not excited…yet,” I told her. I debated if I wanted to carry all my bags into the bathroom to pee or wait until boarding the plane. (Solo travel is great until you realize you don’t have anyone to watch your stuff.)

“You’re going to love it, I know you will,” she said cheering me on.

So, feeling like I would let people down by not going I got on the plane.

I won’t lie, my depression kept ping-ponging the entire trip. Touching down in Dublin didn’t magically erase it like I hoped and quietly prayed it would. The first couple days I couldn’t shake an overwhelming sadness, which then made me feel guilty because I was in Ireland and depressed. I’d leave the hostel in the morning and try to keep myself busy, but all I wanted to do was sit and just not be anymore.

There are three things that always help lift myself out of a depressive episode – running, photography or baking. I didn’t pack my running shoes and I wasn’t going to spend money buying ingredients for the hostel kitchen. But I did have my camera and a whole country to explore.

As someone who lives in his head a lot calculating ‘What if’s?” photography helps dial it down.  Looking through a viewfinder I focus on moments instead of scenarios. The way the light hits a building or the flap of a bird’s wing; how someone is crossing the street or the way the traffic is moving.  It makes me mindful in a way that I’m not in other parts of my life. Without a camera in hand, I’m pretty spacey, fairly clumsy and forgetful (I grocery shop a minimum of three times a week because I’ve forgotten an ingredient). However, standing back and lifting it to my eye make me hyper-focused on something else. Even if a shot doesn’t come out the way I want, the time I spend watching something through a viewfinder makes it stick in my memory like sticking your handprint in concrete before it dries. 

This picture was taken on one of my last days in Dublin after spending the morning in Howth. I crisscrossed through the city the entire afternoon and was heading back to my AirBnB to chill before trying some nighttime shots and eating the absurd amount of Digestives and Jaffa Cakes I grabbed from Lidl.  I stopped for a second to adjust my bag and something about the way the sunlight tiptoed across the water made my brain just click off in a good way; as if I just finished a great movie and turned off the television.

Seagulls chattered above and the nighttime chill crawled in slowly. Tourists and commuters walked behind me while I sat and stared, letting all my intrusive thoughts evaporate and a calm settle that I hadn’t felt for a couple months. The light was very Californian, balanced between a warm kiss and a biting chill with the street buzzing, but not busy.  I sat for about ten minutes just staring before taking a few snaps, leaning my elbows along the guard rail. The shutter clicked, the gulls cawed and the murmur of passersby flowed down the street. I felt I could breathe.

Now, more than a year later when I feel anxious or I can feel a depressive episode triggering I return to this shot.  Staring at it reminds me of that same relaxed feeling, a gentle nudge to say, “The waters calm, breathe again.” It doesn’t always work and I feel incredibly dumb when it doesn’t, but for the most part it remains like a little digital token I keep of being mindful of being focused on something in the present, of a moment and not hypothetical scenario.

I’m really thankful I went to Ireland, despite the harder moments and metal roadblocks I experienced on the trip and this picture and moment is one of the reasons why.

In a lot better place than I was. Sorry for the sap.