teamwork makes the dreamwork

I spent the past weekend in New York in the company of someone who never ceases to surprise me. I'm honestly not a huge fan of New York, but this weekend was pretty fat, lovely, and unforgettable. 

Of course the first thing seen is a tragically abandoned baby doll at an intersection... We got lunch at Terri, a vegan/kosher fast food restaurant. I had the buffalo chicken sandwich. Strawberry smoothie very on point. 

We wandered around a few museums, but sadly no photos. Highline! 

Dinner was eaten at Palà Pizza. Nice pizza place with delicious vegan options in a garage? Seems very New York. 

After dinner and a bit of wandering, we arrived at Brooklyn Bridge Park (I think?) right at sundown. It was misty, foggy, and a little bit eerie, but city lights at night are always awe-inspiring. So are vegan maple donuts. 

The day ended in torrential disgusting New York downpour. I had a "rain jacket" but it really didn't do anything. Shoes were soaked, pants were soaked, backpack was soaked, but spirits could not be ruined. 

Day 2 began in Chinatown, on a mission to consume all the vegan dimsum. 

So much deliciousness. Post food-coma was spent at B&H Photo nerding out about all the camera things (the Fujifilm X-Pro2 is so beautiful wow). Short pitstop in Central Park. 

The walk from Central Park towards the bus stop on 34th was filled with chai tea, sky shots, and Blossom du Jour. 

Quite a wonderful weekend, thank you New York (but not really New York, except the food maybe). 

details in the fabric

Just a quick update on daily photographic experiences from my daily commute to work. Also, this Wye Oak song makes me really happy.

step one: wake up, now open your eyes / now float to the window, open the blinds

“Thick-skinned chameleon
Climbs the curtains hanging on the wall;
The only living ghost to grace the hall.

Meanwhile on the battlefield,
Another soldier boldly bites his tongue;
The only noble thing he’s ever done.

Step one: wake up,
Now open your eyes,
Now float to the window,
Open the blinds,
Now nevermind
The cold shiver on your over-exposed spine
Still lying on the bed where you left it,
Soaking up the sleep from the mattress.

And that’s it;
Feel your way to the kitchen,
Bring the milk to a simmer,
Spill the sugar on the surface of the counter,
Thin-skinned calcium sipper.”

— "Milk" by Sea Oleena

As I delve deeper into the melodic rhythm of summer, I find myself frequently pulled back to the nostalgically carefree summers of early high school. It was there, in my muted yellow room of a sunny Southern California townhouse, that I began to discover some of the many things in this world that intrigue me.

Although “carefree,” my summer days were not spent lounging around in the traditional sense of the word. Those unstructured minutes were valuable, and since the first summer before my graceless entrance into high school, I vowed to make the most of them.

What did I do?

I’ve asked myself this question quite often recently. Working a typical 9-5:30 job, I’m granted a limited number of hours to pursue my own goals this summer. After commuting home, resting my brain, cooking, and unwinding, I have around four to five hours to distribute among my endless curiosities and pursuits (assuming I want a decent amount of sleep). 

Although some summers are more vivid than others, these are things I remember focusing on most during high school:

1) Photography: I spent countless hours researching rangefinders, learning about exposure, hunting at Goodwill, wandering around my house looking for the next interesting strike of light, blogging, taking apart cameras, failing at putting them back together etc. It was through this process that I began to learn the difference between looking and seeing.

2) Music: I honestly cannot remember the first song that made me realize that music was capable of invoking indescribable feelings, but *Milk* is as good as any other one. Discovering Sea Oleena was life-changing, even if it just meant I started spending hours of my day scrounging YouTube, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud for the next "Youth", "Smoking Books", or "Paris".

3) Books: Reading has always been one of my favorite past times, but summer is when books would make me lose all sense of time, space, and (almost) consciousness. Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk realized my fascination with what I call “trippy fiction” and eventually led to my love of Murakami's work. Jonathan Safran Foer made me re-question my dietary choices in Eating Animals. I read a lot of John Green, although I’m not sure why. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo may hold my record for fastest time burning through a series.

4) Movies: I watched a lot of movies alone. Black Swan. 127 Hours. Blue Valentine. Shawshank Redemption. IMDB was basically my homepage, and I tried to watch anything and everything I found interesting. Despite the stigma of watching movies alone, I feel that a lot of my visual language in photography is derived from the cinematographic observations from those movies that I absorbed alone.

5) Basketball: I definitely couldn’t forget this one. Most of the twilight hours were spent on the outdoor courts of my high school, trying to make 100 shots in a row, working on post moves, training my left hand, or just basking in comfort of the breezy sunsets. My basketball "career" was plagued with accidents and physical injuries, but nothing taught me how to battle pain more thoroughly than my love for that sport. 

Maybe this doesn’t sound so interesting anymore…They seem like very typical hobbies. Maybe so, but I find that each of these hobbies have made a significant impact on who I am today. The books I’ve read, the movies I’ve watched, the songs I’ve heard, and the discipline I’ve learned on the basketball court never leave me. I learned that summer minutes are indispensable.

This summer, no longer blessed with the long unstructured days of pre-real-human-life, the stockpile of minutes is much smaller. I’m constantly being forced to choose. Should I play more guitar, hoping to finally nail "Cherry Wine"? Should I watch the next episode of Planet Earth? Should I read the next chapter of Cloud Atlas? Should I listen to an episode of Radiolab? Should I write? Should I get dinner with the close friend I haven’t seen in a few weeks? Should I go play basketball?

Traditionally, I’ve mapped out my summers by what I want to accomplish quantitatively—read 10 books, finish my summer assignments by July 15th, play guitar for an hour a day, etc. This summer, I’m trying to think abstractly about my goals, and find more comprehensive steps to get there. Instead of focusing on activities, I’m centering my focus on five aspects of myself that I want to work on. At the risk of sounding like an airy self-help blog, here they are: 

1) Empathy: By definition, empathy means the ability to understand share the feelings of another person or being. The ability to truly place oneself in another's shoes is one of the qualities I admire most in other people, and something that I am constantly working on. Luckily for me, I spend a significant percentage of my work days working on this, trying to understand people's problems, what they want, what they need, what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what makes them frustrated etc. Applying this same type of emotional awareness to people around me has helped me become more understanding on many fronts. 

2) Forgiveness: This is related to empathy, but different. I am very hard on myself, constantly. It's easy for me to blame myself for things that aren't really within my control, question my abilities, and be harsh towards myself in general. It can be motivating at times, but as a whole, it causes a lot of unnecessary pressure and unhappiness. This summer, I'm learning to forgive myself for mistakes, to be gentler on myself, and to fully understand that failing is necessary for growth and development. 

3) Mindfulness: A big mistake I made this past school year was not taking the time to reflect on some aspects of my life. I found meaning in my school work, but the quality of many of my relationships became questionable. Writing is my favorite form of introspection, and I'm making more time to put my thoughts to paper (or pixels). Podcasts have been helpful in this process of finding mental clarity--I especially enjoyed TED Radio Hour's "Nudge" episode. Maybe I'll write about that one another time. Mindfulness also includes thinking about my role in the world in a broader sense (hence the interest in Planet Earth). 

4) Health: My health is something I've always tried to prioritize. Whether this category involves food, exercise, or sleep, I want to actively make sure that my health does not suffer due to all of my other commitments and goals. I'm making an effort to learn how to cook new deliciously healthy foods, play basketball more often, go biking, and to sleep a restful number of hours each night. Without health, most other things become meaningless.

5) Creativity: As demonstrated by my high school list of five, I find fulfillment in creativity. This could be interpreting someone else's creative outputs (movies, books, music) or creating my own (photography, music, drawing, writing, graphic design). I'm trying to find a balance of both and to derive more personal motivation from other people's work. Lately, I've been inspired by the musical hobbyists on Soundcloud--they might not have many listeners, but that doesn't make their music any less magical than some big names on Spotify. Instagram serves a similar purpose for photography. I think it's been important emphasize the belief that any "ordinary" person is capable of creative genius. This is why I'm blogging, and this is why I've been inspired to take more photos again. 

These are my "goals" of the summer, if you want to call them that. They could also be my five Islands of Personality, a la Pixar's Inside Out. These thoughts were all triggered by the song that started this post. The line "step one, wake up now open you eyes, now float to the window, open the blinds" always reminds me that actions are sequential. Overall tasks might be overwhelming, but if you break apart even the largest goals into achievable steps, everything becomes much easier. Not bad for a song about milk, really. 

If you're still here and wondering why there are random images throughout this post, these are various images from my summers at home, hunting around my house for interesting subjects.

Thanks for reading. :) 

hi, hi, hi

A bit more than a week ago, I took a brief weekend trip to Maui to attend my mother's wedding (congrats, Mama :) ). Aside from the brutally long flights, it was quite a refreshing change from the daily life in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first thing my brother and I noticed coming off the flight was how much slower the pace of life was on the island. We were used to the hustle mentality of the East Coast, and had to consciously take everything down a few notches (driving, walking, talking etc.). 

Our first stop off the flight was Choice, a raw vegan restaurant known for their acai bowls. 

Since the wedding was the purpose of the trip and we both couldn't stay longer, my brother and I had very little time to explore Maui. We managed to squeeze in some tanning, stargazing, and The Road to Hana.

Stargazing in Hawaii was quite an indescribable experience. Sitting in the convertible Mustang with the top down on a clear night with Gallant's Ology blasting on the speakers was something out of a dream. I don't really know what else to say about it, except that everyone deserves to experience something like that at some point in their lives.

“I was a pauper
Fickle and bruised
Wishing I could atomize these lonely lunar views
But with thorns in my ankles
And rocks in my shoes
I weather through”

— Gallant, "Oh, Universe"

Another Gallant song, but this one is my favorite: 

We parked in a roadside turnout and I made my first attempt at astrophotography. I had my Gorillapod and my X100T, but no remote shutter release so I had to hold the camera as steady as I could for more than a minute. Rain was falling sporadically, but the skies remained clear enough to capture this. 

Our next Maui experience was The Road to Hana. We got the GyPSy Drive Tour app which was worth every cent--we definitely would have missed a lot of subtleties of the journey without it. I realized this might have been my first rainforest experience. The rain came and went in seconds, drenching us within seconds and revealing the beautiful blue sky within the next minute. The intense heat and humidity didn't help the being drenched situation, but by the end of it, I didn't really care. Each viewpoint made me question reality, and made me realize (as traveling always does) how little of the world I've seen. 

As we were driving, my brother also mentioned "that Tumblr quote," which I will include here:

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
”

— Isak Dineson

This is indeed a very "Tumblr" quote, but it still seemed relevant at the time. Maybe because I was in the ocean sweating from the heat and crying at the beauty of it all, or something like that. 

We encountered waterfalls, bamboo forests, an abundance of mangoes, and incredible coastal views. We also saw some large spiders and mongooses...I guess that's what you get in the rainforest. I'll let photos do the talking here. 

My time in Maui was sadly short, but I find it hard to believe that I won't return there at some point. For now, I'm back in good old Cambridge, excited for more summer adventures. 

Entire photo collection here

rediscovering, repurposing

I’ve been pretty AWOL from my blog (and photography in general) for a while now. Part of it was the chaos of schoolwork, part of it was the loss of vision. I haven’t been happy with my photos for a while now, mostly due to the neglect. I’ve been trapped in a bit of a haze, and I’m hoping summer will fix this. 

The discontinuation of FP-100C was unexpectedly disheartening. I had begun to view the world around me with a Land camera filter, almost. Despite the size and weight of those cameras, they were the cameras that I carried with me and ached to shoot with. I sold both my EE100s and Land 450 after the film was discontinued. I didn’t want to be attached to something that didn’t exist anymore. 

I felt like I retreated into a shell after that. I took photos now and then, but I stopped bringing cameras with me everywhere, stopped looking, and most importantly, stopped taking photos even when I noticed something worthwhile. I ignored my eye and my instincts. As a result, I ignored a big aspect of myself. 

I find joy in the little things, the very things that make me pause in the incessant flutter of time to inhale the present and exhale my worries. Photography is my form of expression, but it’s also my form of introspection. 

I have a lot of goals this summer—gain some more guitar skills, read a variety of books, become more confident in my sketching, and find myself again. Undoubtedly, that process will be closely tied to photography. I’ll be posting a lot more from now on—I’m excited, and I can only hope that you are too. :) 

A photo of a plant outside of my office for the summer. It's heavily underexposed, but I was trying to invoke the sense of eeriness and emptiness that I was feeling. 

A common scene on my 30 minute walk to/from work through Somerville. The sky was particularly beautiful today. 

motivation and purpose; memories are the best things i ever had

I've had a photo blog since the first day I decided I wanted to become a better photographer. This was 2010, I was a freshman in high school, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The blog is titled "Memories Were the Best Things We Ever Had", a mantra from Ben Howard's "Old Pine" that has resonated with me since the first time I heard it. 

Since its inception, I posted nearly all of my acceptable photos onto that blog. Some of my scattered thoughts made it onto there as well. Last week, I officially ran out of storage space on my Wordpress. I accidentally deleted around 40 images to make space for new ones, but I realized I was unwilling to replace my old photos with new ones--after all, memories were the best things we ever had. Therefore, I'm moving my blog to this little nook on my personal website. I probably will not be posting all of my acceptable photos anymore, but I am hoping to write more about product design, personal experiences, and the little things in life. 

I've always had a hard time balancing my love and appreciation for well-designed products and my desire to keep my life as materially simple as possible. Even though I'll be writing about cool products and objects, please believe me when I say that memories will always be the best things I ever had.