Carpet diem

First you might think this is a carpet. Look closely, or even better: read on to find out what this picture is all about.

The month of October did not really kick off the way I would have imagined. The gravity of the changes happening took the life I had been carefully building by storm – but instead of whining about all that, I’ll just focus on one of the sweetest moments of the past autumn.

I got a call from my family living in England on Monday. They got tickets for me and my brothers for Sunday’s NFL game in the Wembley. What was shaping up to be a woeful weekend, suddenly became a highly anticipated couple of days.

So my younger brother is a huge Chargers fan, and the LA team happened to face the Tennessee Titans that Sunday. For him, it was a match made in heaven. For us, it was still an amazing experience. Apart from the match itself being pretty entertaining, seeing tens of thousands of people breathe, yell, cheer and curse together was just captivating.

It was probably around the second quarter when the sun was creeping closer to the horizon. As it dipped underneath the Wembley’s dome, it briefly lit a thin stripe of the crowd. Until that point, having my camera hanging around my neck seemed redundant – now I was grateful to myself for not forgetting it at home. I took not one but three pictures, out of which one was underexposed and another overexposed – even the image above barely made the cut (see the slightly burnt stripe).

What I love about the fixed lens here is that it truly captures the gigantic dimensions of the stadium and the crowd filling it up that day. And if you squint a little, it might appear as though you were looking at the pattern of a carpet.