Print: Maw

First off, I'm sorry if this photo offends or disturbs you. I'm not one for making horrifyingly morbid images, but today I made an exception because of the impact this subject made on me. This impact isn't easy to articulate into words, but here it goes.

Most importantly, I love animals. Nothing makes me more upset than seeing an animal in pain. My cat died nearly a year ago, and I still get tears in my eyes when I remember holding him in my arms while he died of heart failure. I didn't make this photo to exploit this animal because it looks like a monster. I made this photo because to me, it perfectly captures the fragility of life. The eyes of the animal, though dead, are still quite expressive. You can tell he (or she) was once a living, breathing being. If you only look at the top 1/3rd of the photograph, he even looks alive. Look slightly downward, however, and his maw is nothing but a twisted mess of flesh. This abrupt transition represents to me how suddenly death can consume us, and how quickly we can turn from thinking, feeling people into nothing but meat.

Sorry to sound so depressing, I just really wanted to share this photo and truthfully tell how it makes me feel. Made with my Nikon Df and 50mm f/1.4D lens.

Glamour.

Portraits of my fellow grad school buds, Harper (above) and Francis (below). Made with my Nikon Df and 20mm f/2.8 Nikkor while on a hike in City Park.

Nap

A one hour exposure depicting a nap with my wife. Notice how tidy her bedside table is compared to mine. I used my new variable ND filter to help create this image. The camera was my Nikon Df with a 50mm f/1.4 lens.

Experimentation: Familiar Glow

Familiar Glow is an entire episode of Frasier I watched this evening, while putting off my photo history reading. It's made up of 30 exposures, each around 40 seconds in length (adding up to about the full length of the episode). This is possibly the beginning of a project where I document the amount of time I spend watching television and playing video games. For future images, I want to buy a 10-stop ND filter so I can make longer exposures, without having to trip the shutter so often. I also want to play around with compositions that are not as tightly cropped around the television screen.

Made with my Nikon Df and 50mm f/1.4 D lens.

The Failed Experiment: "January 12th, 2017"

After my 5 days project, I began to think about different ways to show the little forgotten moments of my life, on a more manageable scale. Yesterday, the 12th, I took a photo every 30 minutes of whatever I was looking at, and layered all the images on top of each other to form one crazy multiple-exposure photograph. There are 24 images in all, as I did not take photos during my sleep cycle this time around. It's supposed to represent the my memories of one day, and how everything that happens just turns into a crazy abstract mess in my head. The end result is simply too ugly, but I spent a while creating it, so I figured why not show it? Here it is, in all its glory.

Print: The Wait

"The Wait" is a digital photograph I recently made with my Nikon Df. It's meant to illustrate the anxiousness and vulnerability I feel when dreading upcoming stressful events in my life (like photographing a formal event, or presenting my work at a grad school critique). Though these feelings have largely subsided within the past few months, I can't help but fell intense anxiety when I know I'll have to perform. I often lie awake at night for days, and sometime weeks beforehand, sweating about the possibility of screwing up. Ain't life grand?

I used a 50mm f/1.8 D Nikkor lens. The scene and image framing was arranged by me, the shutter was tripped by Katie. Processed in Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro 2.