2010 Scholarship Entry

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

The Pacific Northwest is a place of beauty and strength. It’s people and land are well watered and hearty, thriving through nine bleak and misty months every year. The cities are littered with coffee shops and microbreweries to thaw your hands and warm your belly all through those drizzly winters. The other three months of the year, fortunately, make for a remarkable summer with parades of bikes streaking down roads and hikers heading in droves to scale mountain after grizzly mountain. And as Portland is named the second most bike friendly city in the world, environmentally conscious Oregonians utilize their bikes not only for joy rides but also as their main mode of transportation, leaving sidewalks clumsily decorated with steely, metal frames. Portland also prides itself on public transportation featuring an expansive light rail system that reaches into the suburbs. It is here in the hillsides you will find acre after acre of hops and vineyards, which produce some of the finest craft beers and premium wines. It is here in the great Pacific Northwest that I began my story and can only hope that I am lucky enough to end it here as well. However, in the time between the beginning and the end I dream of finding the rare beautiful side of places unknown so as to share them with others as I see them. I have fought my ambition and life as an artist worried that I would not have enough to contribute back to the field or humanity, but lately I have chosen to approach my photography as if I do. In other words, I have made an ally out of myself and am ready to battle out my ideas with the world and learn from the best as to just how that is done.