ERIC KIM ₿

How to optimize and maximize your creative power:

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Allow me to re-introduce myself. My name is ERIC KIM and I have devoted my life to photography.

Why? Let me share:

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I am convinced: street photography is the supreme form of photography.

Also — photography as the most interesting and noble form of art-creation for us visual-artists/streettogs:

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On creative muscularity:

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What is the purpose of life? There isn’t an ‘ultimate’ purpose of life that applies to everyone. But for us brave streettogs, this is my thought:

The purpose of our lives is to devote ourselves to photography.

Our goal:

Use our entire lives, our entire power to make great photos, share great photos, innovate photography, discover new compositions, and push the genre and culture of photography forward!

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The other day I was using Adobe Lightroom, and for some reason, got kicked out. I forgot my login id/password, and thought:

Damn it, I don’t want to go through the bother of recovering my ID/password, etc.

I then thought:

Hmmm — if Adobe has these kind of annoying lock-out things, perhaps it is best to NOT use it at all, and discover some sort of alternative.

Thus, I tried using Apple Photos instead. And honestly, I think I prefer Apple Photos over Adobe Lightroom. Why? Let me explain:

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All of life and all of photography is good:

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Why do we love free? Free as in price, or free in terms of freedom? Or both?

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The beauty of life : the impermenance and ephemeral nature.

For example, realize any consumer good you buy won’t and shouldn’t be forever. I always got suckered with trying to buy the perfect device: the perfect camera, phone, laptop, tablet, etc. But it seems the more realistic goal: just buy stuff expecting you to not own it for so long. Also realize anything we buy, we will eventually get bored of it. Thus we should still aim to buy things which will be more robust to time, but nothing will be robust forever.

The new aesthetic and fashion of the future: austere luxury.

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Towards a person-first approach, or a human-centric approach.

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A new collection of some of my favorite photos:

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Thoughts on Identity

There is a lot of talk about identity and ‘identity politics’. But I wonder — why do we care so much for identity? And is identity overrated?

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Art is long, life is short (ars longa, vita brevis).

Our human biological lifespan is limited. At best we can live to be 120-140 years old. But what do we desire? Perhaps to EXCEED the tyranny and confines of our singular human lives, and aim for some sort of immortality through our art, ideas, and offspring.

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The principle of life:

I ain’t gonna stop! I’m moving too fast!

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It seems most of us are dissatisfied with where we are right now, and would prefer to be somewhere else.

For example, we often get the feeling that “the grass is greener on the other side”. But what if your grass were supreme? What if the grass is greener on YOUR side? What if the optimal strategy in life were to stay put, and to maximize your own garden — right where you are living and standing?

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When I look at my old photos, I almost feel as if I re-experience the experience again like it were my first time!

What should you dedicate and devote your life to?

A thought:

Perhaps we can devote our lives to photography — to explore the depths of photograph, aesthetics of beauty, secrets of motivation and inspiration, and the great will to live and photograph.

We shall become the new photographer-artist-philosophers of the future par excellence!

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Something I realized —

Cities which are more chaotic are more interesting and fun to photograph.

For example the joy of naming photos in Hanoi, NYC, or Tokyo. The chaos wakes us up!

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No matter how “boring” or ordinary your life, just shoot it!

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What’s the purpose of color? My thought: color as a strong visual stimulus which puts more energy, vigor, and movement to your legs and body!

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I hate notions of limits. Even with my blog, website, and server — I got a hard upper-limit of 1 million files. But what if I want to upload 10million files? Or 100 million? Or 1 billion photos?

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Each photo is another molecule of water in the stream:

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It ain’t about good or bad photos — it is about sincere or insincere photos.

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To look at old photos is almost akin to shooting them anew!

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There is the common saying in academia “publish or perish”. This is often seen in a negative light.

But what if we flipped the notion upside down, and thought that publishing IS PLEASURE?

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Why do you love photography is the question we must always ask ourselves and ask others:

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One of the most important things in photography — the art of selecting your photos.

My current fun workflow:

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New composition studies from some of my photos:

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I have been a cold shower devotee for the last 6 years or so, and it’s probably one of the best “life hacks” I know.

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Many us of us desire to retire. But once we retire — then what? My idea: use your retirement in a very active way, to actually become MORE creatively productive and prolific, and to pursue artistic and philosophical aims that don’t depend on utility or money-making!

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The most fun and enjoyable life — focusing our lives on photography and nothing besides photography?

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An idea— perhaps the best way to buy things is to buy it cold. Don’t feel the heat of passion and desire when you want to buy something. A purchase should be a cold, rational, and pragmatic decision. Perhaps this will help us be less suckered by consumerism for the sake of it.

One of the best ways to teach yourself composition:

Look through your photos and sketch/annotate them.

By doing this, you can better internalize, understand, and digest your photos. I do this with my iPad, Dropbox, and the built-in Apple Photos screenshot/markup feature:

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My personal life goal:

To become hyper-human.

What does this mean?

1. Hyper-human in terms of loftiness of mind.
2. Hyper-human in terms of insanely overflowing physical, mental, and artistic strength.
3. Extreme artistic productivity and prolific ness

How to achieve this?

1. Extreme weight lifting. Extreme meat-eating.
2. Pushing everyday to the upper-limit— living life at the edge.
3. Not being distracted by petty matters— to value and prioritize your own personal self-development and growth above everything else.
4. Treating yourself as a life experiment. Subject yourself to all the most interesting tests and feats of strength for yourself.
5. Extreme sleep and recovery: To perform at this level, prizing sleep, rest, naps, recovery, strength augmentation, massage, acupuncture to make you hyper-healthy.

Photos with joy, hope, optimism and life!

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What is the most fun and rewarding life? When you’re living life at the edge and extreme!

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Why black and white over color? Color is great, but the benefit of black and white:

It leaves more to the imagination of the viewer!

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Online shopping is great, but I’d rather encourage in person shopping. Why? The ability to touch things with your hand, and actually try and hold things in-person.

For myself, when I try things in-person, I often discover I don’t really like it. For example testing the new iPhone in store is useful, because I can see how the phones feel in my hands, instead of getting suckered by marketing and online tech specs.

Also I find I discover how much I truly like objects when I touch them in-person. Like Marie Kando says, when you touch something, does it “spark joy” or not? There’s so much intelligence in our fingers and hands. So when possible, test things in person, hold them in your hands, and you’ll discover how you really feel about something.

Do this with laptops, phones, cameras, clothes, shoes, watches, cars, etc. Maybe also with human beings!

Where Should You Stand?

“Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.” – Archimedes

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Take photos you find have an interesting composition and then break it down — make it more abstract, inverse it, apply color, gaussian blur, trace it, and fill it in:

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What is an optimal way to live life?

Create the optimal conditions for your own personal thriving in life.

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Never stop practicing. Practice is like it were your first time. Retain your child-like “beginner’s mind”.

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It is obvious that retirement is a good thing. I retired. Why did I retire? In order to focus on artistic and philosophical production.

But what holds us back? Fear. Also, perhaps we should put a stake in the ground and state:

I have retired.

More thoughts on retirement:

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Someone who inspires me a ton is Eminem. Why? He is rich as fuck, but he still raps. Why does he still rap? He is striving towards self-mastery. My thought:

As long as Eminem keeps rapping (and never stops), he will become the GOAT (greatest of all-time).

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My thought:

I don’t have the “free will” to “will” myself to be positive and optimistic; it is simply who I am and how I feel.

But how did I become so positive and optimistic? My reflections:

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People of the future will desire what we already desire today:

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In pursuit of making great street photographs:

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As a photographer, you’re also a visual poet.

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What is one of the noblest goals you can have in life? Simple:

Focus on your own personal development.

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Life is too short to be average, or to strive to be average:

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The secret of success in photography —

Become a fully vertically-integrated you.

Become a “full-stack” photography entrepreneur: you do all the marketing, blogging, YouTube video making, branding, advertising, communicating, publishing, designing, editing, selling, teaching, and creating!

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What is the best type of technology?

Technology which BLOCKS distractions. Technology which BLOCKS other forms of technology.

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A thought after reading Kobe’s “Mamba Mentality” book:

Perhaps the best way to live life is to strive to become the best individual at something on planet Earth.

To strive with all your power to become the best individual in a certain field or skill. 100% success isn’t guaranteed, but isn’t the striving the best part?

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An entrepreneurial idea:

If you desire to become successful (or more successful), do the following: upload 90% of the time, and download only 10% of the time.

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What is your ideal photostyle?

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What is photography, life, philosophy all about? Simple: just share your own personal perspective on things!

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When in doubt, just shoot it.

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Practical thoughts on how to photograph:

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What is the best life and lifestyle?

One which requires the minimum amount of maintenance, care, stress, and bother.

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In life, we need more slack (more buffer space in-between our lives).

Anti-optimized living.

Pursue entrepreneurship for your own personal and selfish aims:

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Written by Jun Goodhouse Kim, originally on engineeredjunk.com

I’d been shooting with a Leica M6 for a while then. I’ve gotten comfortable with film. I’ve had the luxury of simply shooting, and not having to go near anything that had “Adobe” written on it (I trusted the local lab technicians for developing and scanning. After all, they are the experts). I’d even properly learned how to shoot with flash. I was really happy that I returned to film. Maybe not because I achieved better image quality, but because I enjoyed and loved the process and the anticipation.

But all romance must end sometime. This wasn’t the case where death did us part, but I realized that it was simply too expensive to shoot film. So expensive that, if I stop shooting film for two years, I can literally afford a digital Leica.

The thought came to me as a revelation. I remember that the decision to buy an m6 was such a big one for me. $1000 for a film body felt very expensive then, but now I am even daring to think about buying a digital Leica? It was absolutely outrageous, impulsive, logical, and so well calculated that it even felt frugal â€“ which is probably the one word you shouldn’t be using when you’re buying anything with a Leica logo.

My two brain cells were in dire protest and they successfully negotiated it down to a used M240. Nothing fancy, nothing new, and plenty good enough to be used in 2019. It will be a workhorse for years to come. It is, after all, a Leica.

The camera is built like a proper tank. The brass top makes the camera feel very dense and surprisingly heavy for the size. Supposedly it helps create a very premium and luxury feel. In reality, it was a pain in my neck – literally. 

While mainly shooting film, I forgot that bad UI in digital cameras was a thing. Leica M240 reminded me of that unpleasant software feel.

I had to google the simplest things like changing the iso range. I quite didn’t like the metering on this one either. Not because it was inadequate but because of how it decided to do it. M240 offers minimum shutter speed that is configurable through auto iso setting. However, to the camera, it is a mere guideline more than anything else. I would much rather the camera take a dark photo than a motion blurred one. Former can be easily fixed in post. The latter, you need a proper time machine.

I would’ve so much more preferred the camera to take underexposed photos rather than decreasing the shutter speed below to what I’ve asked. The sensor is capable of 13.3 stops of dynamic range. The raw was already properly underexposed and I could pull out so much from the shadows. For a camera from 2013, it was damn impressive.

Luckily, the camera’s intelligence didn’t bother me all too much. I was used to shooting with everything fixed for some time with a flash, f11, zone focused, iso 400, and flash sync shutter speed with a little bit of blur in the image. 
A little bit of tweaking was required to get everything the way I wanted on M240, but the principal was basically same as when I was shooting film.

Leica says that the camera is “splash-proof” and it absolutely did survive several street photography sessions while raining.
I suppose the good weather sealing came with some cost. The camera is a lot bulkier than its predecessor M9 and a lot thicker than film M’s. I like to wear my rangefinder around my neck because it helps me get into the shot quicker, but walking around with the camera + flash around my neck was getting too tiring. Since there was absolutely no way that I was not going to strap a $3k camera to my body in some way, I chose to have a wrist strap instead.

Along the way, I developed a weird way of shooting. Perhaps a bad habit or perhaps an artistic choice, but because I had my camera attached to my wrist and I wanted to shoot quickly, I shot a lot from the hip.

I contemplated if I should stop shooting like that, or at the very least, turn on the live view. With a modern mirrorless, the choice would have been dead simple. With a Ricoh GR III, I wouldn’t have have a choice or even the problem in the first place.

In order for any mirrorless camera to show live view on the screen and to calculate focusing for auto-focus, the shutter has to be open with the sensors exposed. Which is why almost all mirrorless cameras have their sensors exposed all the time. Also, with Sony’s Electronic First Curtain Shutter – EFCS implementation, it takes the photo as the shutter simply closes. Even without EFCS, the shutter operation is very fast that you don’t really notice that the front shutter curtain closes, opens, and rear curtain dropping to finish the photo.

Leica rangefinders on the other hand, does not need the shutter to be open for normal operations and only opens when in live view mode. So when you’re shooting thru ovf, the shutter only opens and closes. However in live view mode, the shutter has to close, open, and close again. Because of this, Leica’s implementation of live view is noticeably slower when taking photos when compared to ovf mode.

So I continued to shoot from the hip. No EVF, no ovf, and no preview. I had no idea what the photo looked like until I was editing. Perhaps it wasn’t the most practical choice, but in a way, that was similar to shooting film.

In the end, I learned how to frame from the hip. With 28mm and enough practice, I could pretty much get the portrait I wanted by pointing in the general direction. The subjects didn’t even know I was going to make a photo because I didn’t have to bring the camera to my eyes. I could keep people occupied with a conversation and get candid looks easier.

After shooting for a while in San Francisco and in Denver, the honeymoon period with the digital Leica was over. My good friend Eric Kim suggested that I part ways with it. So my $3k experiment came to an end after about a year and I went back to shooting film for the time being.

I sometimes do miss having M240. It had its quirks and it wasn’t flawless, but it still had soul and had character. However, considering the way I shoot and the workarounds/habits I had to develop really indicated that it just wasn’t a practical choice especially in 2019 – not that it would matter for most Leica shooters anyways.

Timeless design, guaranteed quality. Meßsucher, the rangefinder. Leica M240.

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Documenting Seoul and Busan on XA2 and Film by Jun ‘Goodhouse’ Kim >

Post by Jun Goodhouse Kim from engineeredjunk.com

Jun: For a fast paced city like Seoul, 3 years is practically forever – which is how long I’ve been gone. So many things have changed, yet some things remained. This time, I was determined that I would look at my home town from the eyes of a tourist and also travel to a city I’ve never been – Busan. I wanted to travel light and see it right, so I ditched all my heavy photography gear and brought an XA2 and my iPhone (To be perfectly honest, all the film ended up being a luggage. Next time, I’m ditching film gear)

I wasn’t trying to shoot street photography so much. Rather, I just wanted to document what I saw. Some rules I made myself were broken (don’t photograph “boring” subjects like people looking at their phones or the back of a person) but I had so much fun simply walking around with a camera in my hand.

Not being able to control any aspect of the shot – including focus, aperture, shutter speed – except for iso was both a blessing and a curse. I missed so many shots due to technical errors, but I shot so much because I didn’t think twice before pressing the shutter release button.

I should go back more often while the door’s open for me.

Follow Jun Kim: engineeredjunk.com

Email Jun: goodhouse.kim@gmail.com

Interview with Jun: Engineer and Visual Artist >

JUNWOO KIM is the inventor of ARS COIN, and a talented visual artist, engineer, and a good friend.

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Interview with my buddy Dylan Fan (only 19 years old!) on his life and street photography aspirations:

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My personal vision for the future of photography entrepreneurship:

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As a sign of authenticity and sincerity, PUT YOUR NAME ON IT!

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A thought about equipment, tools, clothing, and things:

Optimize for the most compact thing, with the highest quality and condensed power.

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In Praise of Beautiful Mistakes and Accidents in Photography.

The thought:

Photography is so fun BECAUSE there is so much randomness, chaos, and chance that goes into it!

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