Some of my Best Photos

I decided to add this page because I wanted to show off some things I've loved doing while at DVS. I love taking photos of things. Two things I love are noticing things and documenting things, so it's perfect I have such an easy way of taking photos right in my pocket. I also got a more "proper" camera for my 18th birthday, a handful of these photos are taken on there. Noticing things is great. Whenever I realize I haven't been noticing things much and return to putting effort into it, I'm always cheered up in the process. There's always something good to be found whether it's a pretty cloud (I love clouds), people hugging on the street, or just a smiley face someone drew on a wall. I can't always get a photo of things that happen quickly (I'm still working on the skill of being ready to whip out my phone or camera at a moments notice) so I usually take photos of things that are slower and stiller. I enjoy taking subjectless photos as well, with nothing that's really the focus. I think you can learn a lot about people from how they leave places.

I love photos for looking back at too. When I visited Zambia I had a lot of fun at my grandmas looking through all the old photo albums, and it inspired me to start one of my own. Turns out its super cheap to print photos at Walgreens. I hope someday my photo albums will be found at the bottom of a dusty box and flipped through by people shouting back and forth from different rooms about where this one was taken, how old so and so was at this birthday party and who that baby grew up to be.

I wasn't able to get all the photos to stay up on this page, so this is a link to a Google Photos folder with all of them. They're vaguely in order of smallest photo to largest photo. The captions here will be in order so it'll match up if you scroll through in another tab.

1. This is the first photo I remember taking. 6 year old me was at a restaurant with my parents, and my mom was taking photos with the camera. I wanted to try it myself when I realized there was no one to take a photo of both my parents together. I like that you can tell how small I was by the framing.

2. I took an online photography class in 2020, each week there was a different theme of photo to take. I don't remember the theme that inspired this one, but it's my favorite from that endeavor.

3. Now to the smallest photo, this is a tiny snail at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I love the colors from the lighting in there.

4. I love taking photos of dew and rain drops on things, that's what I set out to do when snapping this one at school. I like closeup ones like this because you can kind of picture how a bug or small creature would see an area that might not look impressive from human height. Getting different perspectives is fun.

5. I took this one in mid-January, still in a New Years-y mood. Although I don't know much about the cosmology of it all, I wanted it to be a yin and yang kind of thing, two opposite sides with a plant in the middle. Truth be told, after I had finished moving around all the pebbles, the plant was wilting a little...

6. The shadows and shades of white are what made me want to take this photo. It almost looks like funky architecture, like scaled up it could be a fancy library from the 70s or something.

7. This one I took on the "proper" camera I got for my birthday this year. I was at my Dads friends birthday party a few days later, and anxious about socializing with grownups, so I kept busy taking photos of the insanely fancy house we were in. This is the inside of the piano someone would start playing every now and then.

8. Just another small perspective. I flipped my phone upside down for this one so it can really feel like you're in the grass.

9. Beetroot seedlings! They were so cute during golden hour.

10. This is at the beach during the May 2024 school camping trip, lots of shiny abalone shells there! But this rock is my favorite (o _ o)

11. I wanted to document the early sunsets at school during winter. I had to play with the angle of it for a while to get the reflection visible.

12. I love the sun in this one. I wasn't sure if my phone camera would be able to take the photo I was envisioning, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

13. This is one of the first photos I took on the camera mentioned in number 7. I was testing things out, trying to figure out the settings and lenses. This one turned out really nice, I like how the streamer is clear and blurry in places.

14. To Monterey Bay Aquarium we return! (Taken on the same trip though) My favorite part of it was watching the kelp sway in these little windows. It was very relaxing to tune out the noisy crowd at the touch tank and just chill with the kelp, so I wanted to save some for later, in a sense. Most of the time I take a photo it's because I want to remember something pretty or a nice moment, and this is at the junction of both.

15. This falls under the "nice moment" category, I was visiting my little sisters nail salon.

16. No comment, just pretty.

17. No comment, just pretty

18. This was also on my "proper" camera, I think it shows the vibe of school nicely.

19. The wizard-wendigo staredown... This was on an older, cheaper camera I had. It was cute and purple, but the photos weren't very high quality.

20. Picture day preparations

21. No comment, just pretty

22. For this one I was precariously perched on the climbing frame at school and I was wearing gloves that kept getting in the way. The perils of a nice photo.

23. At the Oakland Zoo. A few minutes after I took this photo, the mountain lion lept alllll the way up a tree in like 3 steps, it was incredible to see.

24. At Lime Ridge Open Space with a mysterious tree. And Sebastien.

25. No comment, just pretty.

26. The reason I like this one isn't because it's particularly nice of a photo (although it's pretty nice), I like that I took it on my birthday on the way to Build-A-Bear.

27. This is one of my favorites I've taken at school! It's just real nice, I dunno why.

28. This is the spire of a church visible from Todos Santos, it's apparently it's one of the oldest structures in Concord (just the spire, not the church).

29. No comment, just pretty

30. I like how you can see the road winding really far away. It reminds me of the Postman Pat intro, seeing his red van going down all the little streets.

31. I like taking photos from the car. It's something to do on long rides, and I don't have to look as hard for opportunities to take one since there's more scenery. The trouble comes with stuff going by too fast for me to be able to get out my phone.

32. No comment, just pretty

33. I love the sheer mass of signs this furniture store has. I could stare for hours. The blank black one usually flashes custom messages, so mesmerizing.

34. No comment, just pretty

35. Karl the fog watching over the San Francisco skyline.

36. In Zambia I got to visit a mine. Fun fact, those hard hats are almost the colors of the Zambian flag minus black if you swap the yellow one for orange. A bit of a stretch maybe. Also, that hen has 15 chicks!

37. My dad and cousins at Grandmas house filling up her car

38. I think all this photo demonstrates is that Kalumbila (the mine town) has stunning sunsets, little to do with any skill I may have. Not much work is required when the view is already so beautiful.