Words For My Pictures

  I use a digital camera to take almost all of my pictures but I shoot film too every now and then. Why do I do that in the age of digital photography? A simple answer is It slows me down. It seemed that analog photography was going to die when digital cameras were becoming better and better every year. Our digital cameras are now more computers than just simple light sealed boxes. They can produce the sharpest images and almost shoot in the dark with their astronomical high ISOs. Don’t forget that you can take thousands and thousands of pictures. But all those qualities that I mentioned or didn’t make a great photographer or produce a great picture. Photography is not just a technical process it needs an artist behind the camera to create a captivating image. That is why slowing down is important which analog photography forces you to do. When I slow down I try to compose each picture so that it will be a meaningful one. I don’t just shoot thousands to come up with one or two ...

  On November 3, 2020, Americans will vote to elect a president to lead the United State of America for the next four years. It is the most important election in modern times and it seems Americans know it. They have turned out in numbers to cast their ballots in early voting and turn out for election day is expected to be big too. Voters have two major choices (don’t forget that there are other candidates on the blot), the incumbent President Donald Trump or the challenger former Vice President Joe Biden. Both candidates are in their 70s but they stand for different eras. Donald Trump wants to Make America Great Again and Joe Biden wants to see the country to become better than what it had been. Better for everyone including people which America never had been great for them. Whoever America chooses the United Stated will not be the same again. If Donald Trump is elected for the second term despite the polls predicting a Joe Biden win. America and the world will witness again th...

  The west coast of the United States had been covered in thick smoke for weeks due to forest fires in Californian, Oregon, and some parts of Washington States. For days we could hardly see the sky, air quality was the poorest in the world. These wildfires are becoming common due to global warming which caused extra dry summers for the region. Wildfires are becoming a common occurrence during the summer for many years and they are becoming more devastating each time. I hope politicians and policymakers will see that there is no alternative fact to global warming and act to stop it.  The smoke-filled air and the smoked covered skies reminded me of Ethiopia in the month of November. Each year in this month people deliberately burn whatever they can burn to create smoke that fills the sky. This ritual started during the Spanish flu pandemic which killed millions throughout the world and Ethiopia was not an exception. No one was spared from the flu which was highly contagious even...

  2020 is a unique year for one reason only, because of a pandemic that the modern world had not experienced since 1918. The world especially the developed world did not expect to be crippled by an uncontrollable spread of a virus. There had been dramatic advancement in science and technology since 1918 but yet again the world is still vulnerable to a simple strain virus. Borders and travel banns couldn’t stop the virus from reaching every corner of the world. The greatest countries are experiencing what poor countries go through every day, to be unable to cope to provide and protect their citizens. But most of all to be incompetent and unprepared for a new facture which no one was prepared for. The most arrogant suffered the most because they thought that they were the best and are on top of their game in every aspect. The pandemic is a great opportunity for the world to see that we need to live in harmony with the universe. A simple microscopic life had disturbed how we work, t...

I didn’t want to write this blog in Anger. I wanted to do it rationally than with bitterness, that is why I took my time. Yes, I am still mad about what the world saw on Monday, May 25,2020  in Minneapolis. The murder of Georg Floyd by the Police which should have respected his right to live, his basic human right. When I first saw the video posted by a courageous 17-year-old girl who witnessed the murder, I didn’t believe it just happened seconds before I saw it because black people had been getting killed by the police and white vigintiles for hundreds of years. The mainstream media hadn’t picked up the story yet so I had to fact check to learn that what I saw is true. A “Modern Lynching” as some described it happening in the United States of America which preaches democracy, rule of law and respect to human rights to the world. A country that criticizes, denounces, sanctions, and invades foreign countries when it feels that those values are infringed. The video shocked t...

Macro/Close Up photography is a great medium to see the little things we usually don’t pay attention to. It seems that our vision is blocked by what we think is important. We are conditioned to see only what we precisive as significant in our life. We often fail to realize what seems small and none essential has a role in our survival or distraction. If we look closely as we do in close up photography, we can see the unseen which has a place in the greater universe because every living or nonliving particle has a place. Like a jigsaw puzzle, every piece is crucial to make the bigger picture complete whatever its size is. Like the things we fail to pay attention to we might look like we are insignificant in the vast universe but we know that we are important. We believe in our uniqueness as our planet which we share with millions of living things is. We should realize we are not the sole being which has a right to live on this macro piece of the universe. We should respec...

Alfred Hichcokes's 1960 horror-thriller film is considered among the greatest films of all time. The library of congress describes the film as "Culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". I have watched this psychological horror-thriller film many times and it always fascinates me even though I know what is going to happen and how the story ends. I couldn't help watching it again but this time I am watching it through my camera's lens and I am taking pictures of scenes in the move in slow shutter speed. The outcome is a thriller by itself. Hitchcock was a genius and all the frames in  Psycho reflect that. The pictures that I took also magnified the talent of one of the greatest directors of all time. The slow shutter speed that I used gave the pictures a sense of movement and the overlapping frames in a single picture gave them double or triple exposure effect. Some pictures have two or three scenes of the movie, making them look like a scar...