The Art of Capturing Light 

Hello world! Please check out my new photography blog:

The Art of Capturing Light. 

I actually update this one and check it frequently, so please share any helpful criticisms or comments that you may have!

As it says in my little 'About Me' blurb, I'm an aspiring photojournalist. My dreams are summarized with this: travelling and telling stories through my photographs. In truth, working for National Geographic - getting to travel, take photographs, and helping to make the world a better place - is an ultimate life + career goal!

(Yes, I'm aware I'm young and have changed my mind about my career/future about a hundred times since middle school.  So I know it's more than likely to happen again. But, I don't know - I think this time is different! [Maybe?]) =P

In the meantime, I'm completely snap-happy. I'm taking photographs every chance I get. While balancing university and studying, friends and social life, (and hopefully a new job soon!) I've also been trying to save up for my own DSLR camera (for the past three weeks I've been using my dad's beautiful Canon EOS 5D Mark II). I know they're incredibly expensive but I am so confident that I have found a beautiful passion, and I'm going to invest as much time and money as I should.

I've been obsessed with other people's photography too; their blogs, websites, and even Facebook pages/posts have kept me on a constant image-absorption loop. Admittedly, I'm trying to muster enough courage to put my own self out there and do my best to be a real certified photographer, hired to shoot memorable events or capture live news for a well-established newspaper/magazine. But before I reach this dream, I have to take baby steps. And I'll start with [dauntingly] putting up my albums and portfolio online for all the world to see.

Because, hey - we all start somewhere.

And I'm really, really excited about this.

Best wishes for you and me!

Early Mornings and Muddled Thoughts

I think I'm in trouble.

(But not in the alarmingly life-threatening sense.)

I'm in trouble because I'm falling in love with words again. Reading, writing, and Scrabble-ing them. I know I've been absent from this blog for a while, despite receiving an e-mail every week about the visits I get for this blog and how long each one lasts. Oh how guilty I get when I read that I actually had people skim my blog for more than 30 seconds... they sure read some outdated and hormone-fueled posts. But still, thank you to those who check my blog out!

Even though I know that a majority if not all of them are those poor souls who accidentally stumbled onto my blog, probably by clicking the 'Next Blog' button at the top of the page...

But I digress.

After nearly a year-long absence (I only wrote one post last year... is that neglect or what!) I thought I would perhaps open up my world of blogging again by posting up an early-morning hazed muddle of my thoughts. (It is 3:46AM at present.) And I choose to write about words.

So lately I've been trying to read a lot and also get my nerd on by playing lots of scrabble and anagram word games. (They're so fun, try Anagram Magic for all you word geeks out there!) I can't get over how amazing a book feels in your hand, on a hot summer day. How amazing it feels to smell the pages and just skim your hand over all the fancy words and beautifully versed sentences that spill out stories wilder than your imagination. There's just something about a set of well-selected words coupled with others to form a story that really get to me. Even doing the physical act of writing is a little miracle of its own. The pen in your hand, the generous instrument allowing you to spill the words out from your mind and appear like magic on that smooth, paper canvas, it can really have a calming effect on you. I think that's why diary-keepers and illustrators get so hooked onto writing. It's just one of the many facets that you can

And I consider myself so lucky to have access to so many books and inspiring quotes.

Have you ever read something so beautiful that it made you want to cry? Or perhaps gave you a pang of jealousy, making you wish that you could articulate your thoughts that well?
I have, actually. A lot of them are the quotes and excerpts from previous posts.


So, to recap, I'm in trouble here (or rather, you guys are in trouble) because along with my renewed love of words and reading, come the desire to practice my writing... And this blog is one of the perfect places to do just that.

A Lover's Discourse, Again.

The Absent One
absence / absence

Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object - whatever its cause and its duration - and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment.

"Now, absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain. The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; ... I - I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense - like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you...

In great haste, I reconstitute a memory, a confusion. A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: "to sigh for the bodily presence": the two halves of the androgyne sighs for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels."

- Roland Barthes