Solitude: All Alone in a Crowd

My take on “Solitude” for Photo 101, Day 5 is not what I’d planned or expected. I have the shots I’d planned to take: wide expanses of space with a lone subject in a perfect rule of thirds position. When I think of solitude, I think of calm, peace, quiet moments alone with my thoughts. It’s refreshing, rejuvenating and ultimately productive.

However, I was jarred into the reality that there’s an altogether different type of solitude, which more closely matches the dictionary definition of isolation and loneliness. This shot, taken entirely unintentionally, captures the essence of that feeling.

I set out to take a picture of the gazebo in the sea at Silver Sands. There are literally hundreds of gorgeous shots of this gazebo online. It’s a favourite wedding site for people from all over the world and therein lies the difficulty of getting pictures of it. It lies behind layers of security guards in a protected section of the island, so me and my little point-and-shoot camera had to settle for trying to capture it from across the bay. I had no glasses and couldn’t see anything but the gazebo in the distance, so I zoomed the camera, lined up the gazebo and quite unintentionally took the picture that speaks a thousand words, all of them “solitude.”