The Sidestreet Light

This little old man was walking to what I assume to be work on one of the side streets in Lake Como, Italy. I don't know what it is about all the little old men and women in Italy but they just make me want to pinch their cheeks they are so adorable. If it weren't weird I would snap a picture of every elderly person in Italy, whether its two women having a chat on the subway, or a woman walking her friend tot he bus stop to see her off or walking to work alone in a suit with a satchel over their shoulder. They are just too precious for words...

The Trusted One

The first little trip I took in Italy was to a place called Lago di Como. This lakeside town in the mountains was so beatiful with the water and the hilltops and the houses built into the mountain side. We were walking around town and I saw this little blue row boat amongst the small motor boats and other fishing boats. It was so run down but looked like it had so much character and so many years under it belt that it struck me as the best boat there was. It was called Lancillotto which is Italian for Lancelot it seems to be a very fitting name for this boat because though it sat there unused that particular day i knew it was the most trusted of those little fishing boats just as Lancelot was King Arthurs most trusted Knight of the Round Table.

The Wonders of Verona

This is a picture I snapped of a little Italian girl on the bridge overlooking Verona Ponte del Castello Vecchio.

The Nonsense of Nothing.

I'll start off by saying that I am a person that does not believe that I am good at many things, one of which is writing. People my age write blogs and journals all the time and I know people who even write with the fire and the passion that was seen in great writers such as John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Tennessee Williams and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I am just not as useful with words as my friends are. On the other hand I believe that I have always had an eye for finding beauty in a space or an angle or a subject that others may not. I bend and I move and I contort myself in all different ways just to be able to capture these things that I see or imagine. I love photography and though I may not be a prodigy or even excellent at it yet...I will be. This is because I am determined to have things that I love to do that don't necessarily fit into another aspect of my life. Photography, for me, wouldn't be a realistic career choice. I feel like saying I want to travel around the world and be a professional photographer would be like a little kid saying I want to grow up to be the President of the United States. In all reality there is a very slim chance of that happening. Also photography can't really be applied (as somewhat of a subset) of what I actually want to do in life. I have realistic plans of being an animal trainer, maybe dolphins, maybe elephants, or maybe even becoming the head trainer for a police K-9 unit. Who knows just yet? But in all honesty photography doesn't fit into that category. I just started an Art History class during my semester abroad in Milan Italy and my teacher said something that was really enlightening. She said that in these days and times people choose a path and are set on learning that subject and the subjects that are related to it but Leonardo Da Vinci is the one who got it right! He was a thinker. He would jump from thought to thought in his mind with no barriers or categories to stop him. He dabbled in a little bit of everything. This is what I want to start doing in my life. My teacher also told her own life story and how she thought she was on one path (pre-med at Yale) and then ended up in a totally different place (teaching Art History in Milan, Italy; where she and her family live) than where she thought she was going to be at her age. So I've decided to let life take me where it wants and as of right now it wants to me to do as much traveling as possible and take as many pictures as I can while I am in Europe. So even though I am a Psychology major studying to train animals, or become a psychiatrist, or become a cop/criminologist or whatever I plan to be, right now right here in this moment in my life I am going to be a photographer and that will be the record for my trip. A photo-journal.

Photos of the places I go, the people I'm with, the food I eat and especially the visions and angles that I see as artistic. It is a hectic time in my life and the pictures I take will capture those moments that are specifically beautiful or special to me. It'll be a bunch of nonsense sometime but it definitely isn't just nothing to me.