2020 End Of Year Collage

2020 has been one heck of a ride for me in my photographic journey. I started off this year as a commuter student packing his DSLR and his prime lens into his bag and carrying it downtown, going out during study breaks to get snaps of his own city in the frigid wintertime air. I spent very little time at home: I left the house early and got home very late. My work and home life had, after four years of struggling, been separated from each other. No longer was I bringing school into my bedroom to keep me awake at night.

When the COVID Lockdown started, I was confined to my own neighbourhood. My work and home life separation had vanished, and now I was having to do all of my schoolwork in the same room that I slept in again. Struggling with a drop in my mood and my mental health, I developed a strong appreciation for my local neighbourhood birds, and committed to photographing them as a way to keep my morale up.

Summer came along with a drop in COVID cases, and it spiralled rapidly into an amazing period of growth, meeting so many new people and making so many new friends at the local skatepark. It was also a prime opportunity for me to try new photographic techniques, like learning how to use the flash and trying different compositions and camera settings.

As the weather grew colder and the skatepark slowly began drying up, I kept the fire going by trying even more stuff, like learning how to use tripods and doing long exposures and light painting. I resolved not to remain idle and to continue finding ways to do the things I loved doing.

Anyways, that's a brief reflection and overview of 2020 for me. I put together a collage of some of my highlights from this year. I tried to pick from different parts of the year and mixed in a combination of different genres and styles. There's a lot of photos I had to leave out of this collage, and the collage is a wee bit messy, but I think it came together nicely enough to sum up how I want to end this year.