Quarantine National Day Fun
It goes without saying that it has been quite the interesting year.*
*Before you read any further, please be advised that this entry was actually originally published on my photography business blog on May 28th. I’ve made slight changes, however the links to the articles I’ve provided below have outdated data on the number of cases/deaths and unemployment which has obviously increased since.
I’m sure there are many people like me, who never thought that we’d ever experience anything like this in our lifetime. Despite the warnings received for the last few years, nothing prepared the world for the enormous effect of COVID-19 to all of our lives.
Over 100,000 people have died in the U.S. and almost 40 million people have lost their jobs. The pandemic has also shone a bright light to already existing issues like inequality, police brutality and systemic racism in our society. We are living in critical times and the crisis is affecting everyone in some way or another. It is certainly scary to admit that it may even affect how we vote or can vote this year. I consider myself very lucky that I still have a job that allows me to work from home. Still times like this makes you realize how fickle life really is. Nevertheless, the one thing that I’m mostly grateful for is the good health of my family, friends and my own.
The company I work for does a really good job of keeping their employees positive and in good spirits. It does help to have great leadership — much better than the one running the country I must say. They provide us with daily wellness quotes, articles to help deal with the current situation, tips on how to better adjust working from home, virtual workout videos, as well as books, movies, documentary recommendations to help educate ourselves on systemic racism and links to organizations where we can support the Black Lives Matter movement. Anyway, I’m not writing this article to brag about my work-, though I’m super grateful for everything they’re doing right now. The reason I am mentioning work is because our management team also tried to keep our department in good spirits.
For instance, during the first week of May (before the horrendous death of George Floyd), we had a Virtual Spirit week. We celebrated each National Day for a whole week by taking selfies or pictures that represented whatever each day celebrated. We started on Monday May 4th and ended on Friday, May 8th.
I wanted to get super creative with it and had just recently started playing with Photofox App, which is very similar to Photoshop with the layer masking, though in my opinion, I think it is much easier to use on your phone than Adobe’s Photoshop phone app. Here are a few of my favorites:
Times were scary when I took these pictures, and we started to learn that the majority of cases and deaths of Covid-19 were minority and poor demographics. I wrote a piece in my blog about my thoughts and support for Black Lives Matter.
