Checking back in…
Los Angeles, 2021
I must admit, I was only able to succeed with one of my goals with this website (which thankfully was the more important one). I wanted to start taking photos to mark the passage of time. At the very beginning of 2020 (in January) I purchased my first camera. I got a Lumix GH5 to be able to make short films and document major life events. At the time I had also been traveling at least every month for work which promised some interesting memories.
I took on my first project with my GH5 on January 20th 2020. A close friend was performing here in NYC and I decided I was going to put my new equipment to the test and record his concert in all its 4k UHD glory. A few days prior I ordered a shotgun mic, found a mini tripod, and got to work learning how the heck to operate my camera.
I think the concert was a success—both for my friend and for my filmmaking aspirations. I was off to a good start and looked forward to a year of filmmaking. The new decade of the 20’s held a lot of promise… and then…well...we all know what happened next.
For the following 6+ months I did absolutely nothing with my camera. I was mostly inside my apartment thanks to the very fortunate privilege of being able to work remote. At the time we were at peak carefulness—especially as New York City was fighting through over capacity hospitals and difficult dynamics. Around July I realized I had blinked and 5 months went by. Wasting days numbing ourselves with trash tv and baking quarantine bread served its purpose. I started this website to force myself to create something instead of just consuming. I posted my first blog post about how I wanted to take photos to mark the passage of time.
I completely failed on the aspect of keeping this website and blog up to date. But a surprising thing that happened was that I fell in love with photography. I had set out to take videos but here I was loving taking photos and learning everything I could about how cameras worked.
Lightroom photo count as of now
Here we are a year and half later and it’s my second post (lol). But I did absolutely never stop taking photos to mark the passage of time. In fact, I have taken over 11,000 photos since then, which averages out to about 20 photos a day.
Another challenge I had put forth for myself was early in 2021. I had just purchased a Fujifilm X100v and decided—in order to grow as a photographer—I was going to post a photo on my Instagram account every single day. The idea here was that I would never be able to take enough quality photos to be happy with what I posted each day, so this would do two things:
Force me to go out and take photos regularly
Force me to look at my photos with a critical eye and choose what to post
This was one of the best things I could do as a brand new aspiring photographer. I can physically see the progression in my work just by sheer brute force of taking a lot of shitty photos. I only really started being happy with photos that I took in the second half of 2021. For the first 6 months of 2021 I took photos in my neighborhood (which is kind of dull). This forced me to develop new eyes in a space I was so familiar with. It felt kind of like going to the gym/hyperbolic time chamber for photography. As I learned to make extremely mundane subjects more interesting, it really helped me when I finally did encounter interesting subjects.
And here we are, it’s the beginning of 2022 and I have invested so much into photography these past two years that I have some photos I’m really happy with. I also finally launched some prints on my new darkroom page. I’m proud of these photos as someone who is a little over a year into my photography journey. I look forward to continuing to share more here as I grow in 2022 and beyond.
