Alameda on camera
02 - 20-22 - 2026 // Alameda, ca
the experience
Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight photographers. Forty-eight zones...
Each one a pulse, a story, a fragment of something alive. When I signed up, I didn’t fully understand what I was stepping into I didn't think I would get selected. There was no clear plan, no mapped-out vision, just instinct. Something in me said go for it, and I listened. That quiet pull turned into a kind of creative reckoning.
Being confined to a single zone in Alameda forced me to slow down in a way I hadn’t before. No chasing perfect conditions, no leaning on continuous shutter or letting auto-focus do the thinking. This was different. This was about presence. About anticipation. About feeling the moment before it even happened.
At first, it was frustrating, like trying to speak a language I thought I knew, only to realize I’d been relying on shortcuts instead of being in the moment. But then something shifted. I started to see differently. Light felt more intentional. Movement became poetry. The ordinary revealed its rhythm.
The people I met along the way really became part of the story too. Brief exchanges, shared energy, quiet acknowledgment. It all mattered. It all shaped the frame.
Every image I captured carried that tension between old and new. I shot on my Sony A7R III and Sony A7R V, but the soul of the work came through the glass, a vintage Leica Vario-Elmar-R 21-35mm f/3.5-4 ASPH, adapted for a modern system. There’s something about that lens… It doesn’t just capture an image, it interprets it. It breathes a kind of nostalgia into the present. Alongside it, the precision of the Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS II gave me reach when I needed clarity from a distance.
Somewhere in those 48 hours, I stopped trying to control everything. I let the imperfections guide me. I let instinct take over again, the same instinct that told me to enter in the first place.
And what I walked away with wasn’t just a collection of images. It was a reminder: sometimes growth doesn’t come from doing more... It comes from stripping everything back and learning how to see again.
