Albums
Click to view the full collection of each album.
Birds have been a huge part of my life ever since my mom bought "fluffy"--a stuffed penguin from Macy's--for me when I was three. I've always loved the way birds dance, sing, play, fight, and love--just like humans. These days, I express my love for birds by conducting early morning window collision surveys for citizen science and responding to injured bird calls around the city. The teams I am in promote bird health for the sake of local--and during migration seasons, global--ecosystem health. However, deep down inside, all of us care for birds because they're cute and fluffy :)
If I were to describe Hunter College High School's cultural shows in one word, it would be spirit. Encompassing a huge variety of traditional and cultural dances, plays, songs, speeches, and other performances from all around the world, these dynamic shows are watched by nearly all members of the high school. Being the de-facto photographer for these events for my high school career has allowed me to experience the energy of the performances up close in every show. The photos speak for themselves.
People are difficult to photograph. Having "people skills" isn't enough--"say cheese" and "move left a little bit" just doesn't cut it anymore. Often, the best photos of people are candids, snapshots of history that capture pure, unadulterated energy...
...energy ever-present in high school semi-formal dances. Writing this out is already making me sweat. Cram a grade of high schoolers into an undersized venue with unlimited food, defective air conditioning, and a DJ and you'll feel this unique energy found nowhere else on earth.
A (generally controversial) genre I was heavily interested in when I was younger, street photography is all about capturing underappreciated elements of daily life, sometimes in a manner that intrudes on personal space and privacy. You've got to be quite bold to take photos of strangers, but the resulting photos are often priceless retellings of humans doing whatever humans do. Nowadays, I do street photography much less often, but the techniques and skills I learned from years of street photography have translated well into the types of photography I do nowadays.
The passenger-accessible front windows of older subway cars had always enticed me with clear views of hundred-year-old architecture and tunneling technology. The windows are gone now, but I still find joy in learning about the melodic variable-frequency drives and hissing electro-pneumatic brake systems of newer trains. Integrating my photography into my love of learning about mechanical things like trains has never been easier--all it takes is one pinch-zoom on a photo to send me down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia pages and Google searches about different systems and manufacturing companies. In the end, there is undeniably a primal joy in seeing heavy things hauling on tracks.