Making great leaps to get back…

The mystique of Instagram and Hipstamatic is that it gives a little twist on the everyday life, the mundane normalcy, and with a little filter added, a whole new world appears.

I love the ability to take images that would actually be fairly unusual in their own right… but then doing the Instagram/Hipstamatic thing and having something absolutely one-of-a-kind.

For instance, a rework of a classic mosaic from Pompeii.

I love it when the face detection feature on the iPhone picks up a 2000 year old face.

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…yeah, can’t decide.

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Grant wanted a camera like mine…

This (above) looks miniature because it actually is. It is a very small reproduction a temple of which only a few pieces still exist.

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This color is “pistachio green”… for a reason.

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Are these photos a little over-processed at times? Yes. Yes, they are.

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Taormina, Sicily.

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Boston…

…can be weird. At the gate, waiting for the flight.

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Back to Arkansas.

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Arkansas can be weird, too.

TOMS shoes barefoot day…

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That window at the LIT airport… I’m in (or at) this airport almost weekly these days. This window always catches my attention. Don’t know why.

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Now… Paris. The span of time in the States was only a matter of days.

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These double/mirrored exposures became unusually relevant for my few days in Paris due to the fact that I was fighting an amazingly high fever for most of the time. So these, more than usual, are a visual interpretation of how I felt. (No, really…)

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To Amsterdam… landing amongst the flower fields…

Then from AMS to Detroit for a night. Then board a 747 for Tokyo…

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Approaching Tokyo…

And then leaving Tokyo…

…for Hong Kong.

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It must have been a Wednesday. That’s the carpet of the Elevator changed every day…

Kowloon…

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My life is a constant stream of real-fake-real-fake. One week I’m actually in Italy, and the next week I’m at the uber-cheesy Venetian in Macau, half-way around the world. One week I’m eating at a restaurant in Little Rock with “French cuisine” and the next I’m listening to a woman sing “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” to a handful of patrons in a tiny unknown cafe off a side street in Paris.

There’s nothing normal about this.

I live in airports and in the in-between places. I stay in flats that don’t belong to me and in hotels with two shower heads and use the metro of major cities like London and Madrid and Athens without looking at the map anymore.

But you know what part I love the most about all this weird lifestyle? The part that actually means the most to me is the fact that I can look at a photo like this below…

…and know it’s not real because, if it was real, daylight would be streaming through that hole in the center.

There’s only so much that Disneyland can replicate.

The Parthenon in Nashville is neat and everything, but if you get too close to it, it’s poured concrete… not hand chiseled stone. Or the flavor of the meat at the French restaurant in Little Rock isn’t quite the same because the chef wasn’t smoking as he was preparing the marinade late the previous night.

These are things that you can only get traveling. Some are quite subtle, but sometimes it is the difference between standing in the presence of a real Monet or Degas or listening to Madame Butterfly at the Vienna State Operahouse instead of hearing it on NPR.

It can change a guy…

But, all that from a guy who has never been to the top of the Eiffel Tower. So who am I to say?

Stay tuned…
-Noah D.

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PS: …then back to Arkansas.