On Her Way

I took a lot of photos on my trip in Southeast Asia. About 1,300 clicks of the shutter to be exact. I went through them and I marked just over 500 as being worth editing. That is a lot of work and will take time--maybe even a year. The problem is that I keep taking pictures in the meantime :). It is fun however to see how I have improved and changed in my photographic style. Even since I have started using my first dSLR just over three months ago. So in a way, I am happy I have such a backlog of photos to go through.

Now the photo above. Of the photos I have edited so far, this is among my favorites. Someone else might not give it two looks when looking at a set of my Cambodian pictures, but to me it special. It is hard to quantify what keeps my thinking about and my eye exploring this photo. When I look at it, my eye follows the thin and weathered grandma and her bike out of the frame and my imagination suddenly takes over. I imagine where she is going, the countless hardships and moments of joy that have made up her life. I wonder how she got to such an old age, when I saw so few elderly people in the country. What have her eyes seen? How did she survive the Khmer Rouge? Does she tell her grandchildren stories of that time or does she hold those nightmares close knowing they are more horrifying than any ghost store they have ever heard?

This photo takes my eye and my mind on a journey that it would never have gone on, and this is why I treasure this photo.