New York Botanical Garden | April 2023
This collage helps me remember a gorgeous spring day, spending quality time with my brother at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. We took silly pictures of each other with the ginormous cherry blossoms, enjoyed the seasonal showcase of orchids, and made sure to point out every birb we saw along the way.
These photos remind me of some of the simplest pleasures in life--a good belly laugh with a loved one, and being able to take the time to literally stop to smell the flowers.
Photos taken on a Sony AIV and iPhone 13 Pro Max; collaged using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop; formatted for Instagram
Paris | photographed Feb 2019, collaged March 2020
This was one of the first collages that I made during the pandemic as an artistic form of escapism as I was twiddling my thumbs waiting for the end of the 2-week lockdown in my small portion of a shared house in Downtown San Jose. I remember feeling bummed that I'd canceled a trip to Italy out of an abundance of caution (evidently, rightfully so)--my depressed, wanderlust-filled heart longed for adventure, so I tried living vicariously through photos taken during a trip to Paris the previous year.
One thing led to another, and here we are, one of my favorite collages to date.
When I look at this I remember the feeling of awe looking at the featured statues in the Louvre (Winged Victory of Samothrace and Venus de Milo, respectively); the amazing flavors in the foods I was lucky enough to indulge in; the view of the Eiffel tower from the Centre Pompidou. I think of the awkwardness I felt setting up my camera on self-timer mode as I ran back and forth between my camera and a striped pillar to get the perfect, effortless aesthetic shot.
Photos taken on a NikonD800 and iPhone 7; collaged using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop; formatted for Instagram
L + Orchids | Photographed 2018, 2019; collaged April 2020
This collage blends solo experiences on two continents where I experienced pure joy and entertainment alone. The orchids were captured at an orchid exhibition in a botanical garden in Paris on Valentine's Day 2019 after an early afternoon of drinking French wine and eating fancy cheeses. I stumbled out of the wine-tasting cafe not knowing exactly where I was going afterward, and somehow found myself in a park with a beautiful botanical garden. It was meant to be.
The train photos were taken completely sober in a near-empty parking garage in Chicago. This was the first time I'd worked with an ND filter. I climbed up the parking garage until I was at a satisfactory height to view the oncoming L train, then camped out and experimented with different settings as the trains came and went. It took about an hour between my troubleshooting and waiting for trains to come for me to get the photos used in this collage.
Photos taken with a Nikon D800, collaged using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop; formatted for Instagram