In May of 2024 I attended a wedding in Charlottesville, Virginia. To elongate the trip and visit a city I've never seen before, we flew out early to Washington D.C. Shruthi spent the day at the office so I took the opportunity to walk around the city and check out all the touristy spots.
All of the photos in this short blog will be over the course of a couple days on my photo walk around the city.
When I began my photo walk, it was rainy and cloudy. I had about a 40 minute walk to the first monument. The first thing I noticed about the city was how many exquisite buildings there were on street corners.
My first stop was the Hirshhorn Museum. It's a free modern art museum that has some really interesting pieces. There was one exhibit called Four Talks by Laurie Anderson. You could spend hours in this room and still have stuff to read and look at. The art style is so distinctive and the stream of consciousness style of text gives an unsettling vibe as you walk through Laurie's mind.
Grabbed a mediocre film picture here. In my mind, the extreme angle of the image would create a more abstract view into the exhibit. While this may be true, I think it's accomplishing this goal a bit too well and makes for a confusing and thus rather uninteresting image:
After spending a couple hours here, I continued my photo walk down to the Washington Monument and Capitol Building. The upkeep around the Capitol was so pristine. Everything looked so picture perfect at all times. It makes sense since this is such an icon for the USA, but was cool to see how perfect the lawns are.
The next morning we took a subway down to the Library of Congress.
Grabbed a few photos of the metro station. I've always loved the vibes for film in metro stations (being a Texas boy and all, we don't have these things where I'm from). However, shooting in low light is always a bit annoying. Thankfully, my Minolta can stop all the way down to f/1.4 so these images look somewhat clean.
The Library of Congress was really photogenic. I found this pretty interesting angle of the pillars. Looking through the arch supports gives a nice perspective of depth as well as a bit of an abstract image at first viewing (which I kind of like).
As we ventured further into the library, we found Thomas Jefferson's "personal" collection. This room was so dimly lit, I'm surprised I was able to get any kind of image out of this room. That f/1.4 coming in handy once again.
After grabbing some lunch, we walked to the Jefferson Monument which was the final stop on our little excursion. On the way, I grabbed a few more images of the streets and alleyways of the city. As cliche as it might be, I'm a sucker for a good alleyway on film.
I didn't find anything really interesting enough to photograph in the monument but the structure from afar was very pretty. Capturing this plane flying overhead was just good luck.
By this point, my feet were aching from all the walking and we headed back to the hotel to rest. Overall, this was such a neat city to walk around and explore. I feel like these monuments and touristy spots have been photographed to death so I'm not sure how much I have to offer in terms of new and creative images. However, I still had a lot of fun taking in the sights and snapping these images.
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