My image is litter I found near my house’s parking lot. I was on the way to throw my own garbage out when I noticed these cartons and plastic just laying on the sidewalk and thought “Nobody’s going to pick this up?” then realized it could be a good subject.

My intended composition was to focus on the carton and put it in the foreground, then have the background blurred showing that even though emphasis is put on the carton up front, people will still notice that there’s even more litter, the cars in the background also serve meaning, since even with all these people living nearby nobody has bothered to clean up the trash on the sidewalk.

This was meant to show my concern for the issue of littering and by extension people’s poor attention to trash segregation and how some countries don’t bother cleaning up large swathes of trash in public places like beaches, rivers and ports.

I’m hoping that people will realize that my image is about trash, and all the issues stemming from it, since I’ve noticed that not many people pay attention to it, I myself have been guilty of being lazy and not properly disposing of my garbage, and I hope that others will be different.

I’m thinking that perhaps there could be certain dedicated days where people walk around the city and clean up any litter and garbage they happen to come across, I’ve seen a video of people in Mumbai cleaning a beach with over 9,000 tons of trash during a big cleaning project, and perhaps there could be projects like this on a smaller scale here in Canada.

I’d say that I learned a little bit more on how to interpret an image’s meaning and message, as someone who has enjoyed photography for over 7-8 years I have come to realize that there’s more to just making a photo look pretty, there could be layers and layers of messages underneath a picture if you take the time to break down the factors and the imagery.

I could try to analyze images from different points of view, so that I’ll prevent being manipulated into a certain mindset from pictures in news and in life.

I want our community to realize the underlying issues of littering and trash disposal, so we can make a change on the ever growing problem of pollution. I’m hoping that the government will make a bigger effort to clean up and make our country and our planet better.