Author: Mark Dizon
April 2, 2022
We are moving to the Netherlands! Mayra and I are very thankful and excited for this once in a lifetime opportunity. We never thought that we would ever get a chance to move overseas and live life in Europe. We have been living together in California for the past eight years and I myself have been living in California for the last fourteen years. This move is a much needed change for us. The global COVID-19 pandemic has been hard on everyone and our move to the Netherlands came at the perfect time.
The world is starting to open up as cases of the virus are starting to go down and the numbers of the vaccinated continue to rise. I intended to start a photography blog when we first moved to Vandenberg AFB,CA back in 2019 but the lockdowns hampered all that. This year we start a new chapter. We begin our photographic journey that focuses on our life and travels across the Netherlands, Europe and abroad. So come join us as we share our journey with you.
In 2011, I wrote a photography blog to record the events of my travels as a Flight Engineer. That blog didn't last as I was in the middle of a transition from leaving the military and trying to figure out what to do with my life. I felt directionless back then. The blog died and I went on with my life. Fast forward to 2022, I accidentally stumbled on that blog page and it rekindled that mission of documenting a life of travel and adventure. I read this post I wrote back in 2011 and it clicked:
"I really didn't care back then of composition and all the technical parts of a camera. I didn't know all the rules of photography and exposure. All I've wanted was to record photographically the events of my life and the people in it. To me images are very powerful. Photography is a way for me to freeze that moment in time. To record it in stone. A document that I can always look at and relive. Isn't it funny how you look at old photographs and how it brings back that exact feeling you had at the time that image was taken? Nostalgia. I want to record the beauty of that experience. That's what motivates me as a photographer. Capturing the beauty of the moment."
I have been given another opportunity to set out on my original mission and this time I have the love of my life as my companion. It has been a crazy past eleven years since I wrote that first blog entry. I've left the military as an enlisted aviator, moved to San Diego, gone through many feelings of heartaches, happiness, feeling lost, ups and downs. But through that time of transformation I found purpose.
So here's to new beginnings.
