Picture>1000 words

Photography continues be an incredibly influential art, it can capture the spirit of a person, an event. It can provoke emotion in a way that no other art can, it can bear a vivid truth that haunts us or inspires us or entertains us in a very special way. Now I am not attempting to make grandios gestures through my photographs, I'm simply trying to capture the spirit of the moment that I'm experiencing at the time. Here in a whole new world, I'm perpetually provoked to capture these moments through an obscene amount of photographs- I'm obviously not succeeding very well in my attempt to acheive quality over quantity here- , some good some not so successful. But it's true that whether I'm choosing them consciously or not, certain ''tropos'', aka rhetorical means, are present in these photos that help tell the story I choose.
This first image of Plaza Majorca in Madrid, I included people sitting at an outdoor restaurant in the frame but conveniently excluded the annoying SpiderMan street buskar off to the left. This helps tell a very particular story of a more traditional Spain, a Spain where traditions of spending long afternoons eating and drinking in the public squares alive, and strategically excludes the story of the Spain that lures obnoxious tourist acts like the over weight Spider Man wanna-be. I wanted to think of Madrid in this traditional sense because it was definitely a city of tradition in my experience, hence the sepia tone.

One more example of how I tried to use a little rhetoric is in this photograph of the Gard D'Oriente in Lisbon. This picture's angle really helps to capture the dynamic lines of the train station. It is a remarkable piece of architecture with dynamicism and movement unlike anything I've seen so to emphasize this even more so I attempted to  capture the spirit of the building at a lower angle running down the facade.