This photograph is from April 18th, 2024, captured on the Marcos Highway in Antipolo City, Philippines. It was the peak of the hot dry season, the air thick with around 75% humidity and temperatures in the low 90s°F (around 34°C.) The view, from the front seat of a van, looks over a mix of local traffic—motorized tricycles and passenger vans—passing under a dense web of utility lines. A blue pedestrian overpass spans the road, framed by the lush foliage of Narra trees.

There’s a particular joy in the technical exercise of photographing from a moving vehicle. It’s an intimate performance—balancing a fast shutter speed against the vehicle’s motion and moving shadows, all while being aware of the shutter’s click in the small, shared space.

Amidst the visual chaos of the street, capturing clear text on the bridge felt like dropping an anchor. It was both an emotional and a technical relief: a hard-coded data point that geolocates the session, a manual substitute for missing GPS metadata. In a vast, unorganized archive, a photo like this helps legitimize the memory, fixing the "where" and "when" with a certain certainty.

The final image becomes more than just a memory; it’s an artifact of that performance. There’s a quiet hope in capturing a fixed point like this—the hope of one day finding this exact spot again, and seeing it from a more content place, with life having grown in the space between.

Digital Wallpaper

Phone: (vertical, 1290 x 2796 px @ 72ppi)
Desktop: (horizontal, 4480 x 2520 px @ 72ppi)