On Saying Goodbye

As you keep reading in my posts, I've been interested in switching majors to Biomedical Photographic Communications... and about halfway through last quarter I finally did. It's the best decision I could have made for myself. I wake up every morning excited to go to class and make scientific images. It's so much fun! And the best part is that it's based on technical skill. If the images you produce aren't technically perfect, then they can't be used in the field... I like that. I've raised the bar for myself, and created a challenge to be the best photographer I can be... and the bar is always just out of my reach so I really have to stretch if I want to reach it.

The pictures above are from my last fine art project. In the middle of the quarter I got a phone call from my mom while I was on my way to the grocery store. It was one of THOSE phone calls... you know where you drop everything you're doing, break down and cry for a while, and then don't remember where to pick things back up again because you're so disoriented. She told me that my grandfather had passed away suddenly. He was doing some roof-work (adding toppers to the chimney to keep the warm air in during the winter so their energy bill would be lower), and then on his way down he fell backwards from the ladder, hitting his head on the concrete. My grandmother found him there when she returned from the store about ten minutes later and rushed him to the hospital. He was basically brain-dead when he arrived and the doctors told my family there was really nothing they could do for him, and to consider taking him off life support... no one in their right mind keeps a suffering person alive, so naturally my family decided to pull the plug and send my grandfather to heaven.

I went home the weekend after the accident and photographed everything I saw. I basically hid behind my camera that weekend. I didn't know how to deal with what I was feeling so I simply took it out in the images. I scanned them, and created a book (which I bound myself!). The two images are two separate pages from the book I turned in for my final critique.