Cal Campus

This work is the most interesting for me.  I have the privilege to go around the Campus twice a day, five days a week.  It is the most interesting because it combines two things that I enjoy: taking pictures and being with dogs.  I started to walk Coco, my neighbor’s chocolate lab, in the spring of 2012.  Very quickly I fell in love with the Campus and began to photograph it, while walking Coco in late afternoon.  This is not of course about The University of California at Berkeley, but about what I see during these walks on the Campus and only on my route, which leaves some parts completely ignored.  There is no planning or preparation involved, just a quick use of the shutter-release button of my pocket camera.  I used a Canon A480 until November 2014 when it got wet in my back pocket during a serious storm, yes on the Campus.  I have been using a Coolpix S6800 since then.  With time, I have learnt how to anticipate as much as possible instead of just watching the action to then realize that I had missed the shot!

I do not do close-ups for two reasons:  I don’t have the luxury of setting my subjects and their faces have yet no story to tell, they are all young good looking kids.  I am more interesting into capturing how they use the space and how they blend into it.  The actual time spent on the Campus is about 20 minutes, 1/3 of the walk.  About a year after it all started, I began to walk in the morning with another neighbor’s dog: Arrow, a mixed black pitbull, lab, ridgeback.  These dogs are present in most of the pictures.  I have created 11 groups of activities, from laying down to reading to being connected and so on, some of them obviously overlap.