The objective was to leave town around 4am in order to travel to Yosemite, CA and capture the sunrise; much like most kids my age, I found it difficult to sleep before the adventure. I had already left my house around 3:30am when I received the text from my buddy RJ, "Hey bro, you up..."

I'll be completely honest, I never slept, this was my first real trip into Yosemite to see if I could capture a bit of the magic so many others have captured whilst shooting from their iPhones or Androids. My camera bag consisted of one camera, two lenses, two camera batteries, two memory cards, and a set of ND filters for each lens; I was ready to shoot epic shots, like 500 of them. I thought I'd come back to town in an Oprah state of mind, telling people, "You get a picture, yooooou get a picture, and yooooooou get a picture!"

Truth be told, I was nervous about our early morning drive as well as my skills in the wild. It has become second nature to shots but now I felt it was going to be me versus the rocks and mountain.

In this day and age, everyone has some means to capture an image and depending upon said image, one may get one like or one million likes. We all post our photography for a reason, only we know what those reasons are for when everything is said and done. Me, I'm attempting to better myself as an artist not to say that I need the approval of social media to tell me that I'm getting a bit better with my talents.

In most cases, it's easy to get gassed up by friends who say things such as, "Hey man, that's dope" when in fact the final product isn't dope it's more like overexposed and not properly thought out in its delivery. Well, my cropping game isn't quite there yet but my eyes are getting a bit better as to where to find segments of beauty.

Me and RJ set out at 4am to capture something different, we found darkness, cold, and a flat sky, however, we also found a park which holds too much beauty for one to attempt to capture within a five hour window.

Finally I found a bridge between what my eyes have been seeing and what my heart wants to see.