In recognition of Martin Luther King Day last Monday, Aida and I joined the many people visiting the new MLK memorial just off Washington DC’s Tidal Basin. The sharp wind and cold temperatures didn’t seem to hold back the thousands of visitors who now have a place to celebrate his great life and keep his memory alive for countless years ahead.
Reflecting Dr. King’s extraordinary power and inspired by a famous line from his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech (“Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope”), the memorial features a 30-foot statue, two pieces of granite that represent the struggles he endured, and a crescent-shaped marble wall inscribed with quotations from his sermons and addresses. Like the Tidal Basin, the memorial’s perimeter will be lined with cherry blossom trees, with their annual peak blooming period coinciding with the anniversary of King’s assassination, April 4th.
As we tried to keep warm walking past smiling faces bundled in hats and scarves, we were lucky to catch young members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity from the University of Maryland, performing their signature stepping dance. The MLK Memorial was made possible largely due to the great efforts of the fraternity that Martin Luther King Jr. once belonged to when attending Boston University.
And only the second outing with my new Panasonic GX1 micro four-thirds camera, I once more enjoyed not lugging around the much larger DSLR while still capturing excellent image quality. Like in NYC, I used the mix of Olympus and Panasonic lenses and once again, preferred the Olympus 12mm, notably for its manual focus used during video recording. As the sun peaked through the clouds and started to set, a beautiful warm light illuminated the memorial and created a dreamlike setting in which to shoot. The bouncing highlights and settling shadows on the marble wall were magnificent and the birds circling overhead brought an added sense of life to the towering statue of this larger than life man.
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