This was outside a flower shop and the arrangement was just overflowing onto the sidewalk, so I got close and shot it at a slight angle to capture how dense and layered it was. I didn’t want a clean, centered shot — the chaos of it was the point. Getting close let the different textures and colors overlap without any single flower taking over, which felt truer to what it actually looked like standing in front of it.
Someone filled a crack in the sidewalk with mosaic tiles instead of just patching it over (or letting it become a tripping hazard), and I thought that was worth stopping for. I shot it from directly above to flatten it out and emphasize the shape — the way the crack bends and the tiles follow it creates this natural geometric form that nobody designed, it just happened. The shadows from a tree across the concrete added another layer of unintentional geometry that I didn’t plan but wasn’t going to pass up.
The theme here isn’t really Mt. Fuji — it’s the person who can’t look away from it. It was almost accidental; framing a stranger in the corner of the shot while they’re completely absorbed in the view turns the mountain into something more than a landmark; it becomes a moment of someone else’s awe that I’ve happened to catch.
Shooting from directly below was something I wanted to try to make the tower feel like it was collapsing toward me. Standing at the base and pointing straight up turned the steel framework into this pattern of repeating diagonals that just pulls your eye all the way to the top. I also liked how the angle made the scale feel way more intense than it does from a distance — up close it’s almost overwhelming.
Kinkaku-ji on an overcast day — no dramatic light, no perfect reflection, just the pavilion standing quietly among the pines the way it has for centuries. The grey sky actually works here, (at least, I feel so), softening everything into the kind of stillness that’s hard to find and harder to hold onto. Serenity doesn’t always look golden. Sometimes it looks exactly like this.
What I liked about this was that it’s technically junk — old rusted spoons, bent forks, a tray with a hole eaten through it — but someone saw something worth making in all of it. I wanted to shoot it straight on so you could really see the wear on each piece, the different stages of rust and tarnish, the way no two utensils aged the same way. The fact that it’s a wind chime felt important too; something this worn out is still functional, still making noise, still hanging there.
The idea behind this shot was to let the sky do the work. By pointing the camera upward and keeping the composition simple — gate on one side, cherry blossoms on the other — the grey sky becomes the subject as much as anything else in the frame. The empty space between the torii and the branches isn’t an accident; it’s what creates the tension and balance.
I noticed the contrail cutting across the sky right as the clouds were catching that warm golden hour light, and I thought the contrast between the two was worth shooting — this perfectly straight, man-made line against all these massive, soft cloud formations. I framed it so the dark clouds sit heavy at the bottom and the contrail runs through the middle, which gives it this sense of layers. The warm light hitting the tops of the clouds while the bottoms stay dark did a lot of the work on its own.
I wanted the environment to say as much about them as their expressions do. Jay and George have filled their home with stained glass they’ve collected and made over the years, so shooting them framed inside it felt more honest than a posed portrait somewhere else. The colored panels surrounding them — reds, yellows, blues — cast this warm, layered light that you can’t really recreate artificially. I kept them centered and let the background do the storytelling.
While my film partner and I were working on our junior year narrative in film class (which involves our characters discovering a portal) we had the idea to also do photoblogs as well, finding it inspiring and interesting how our actors eyes captures the minimal yet colorful light we had in place of our portal.