I don’t think the purpose of a vacation or any activity (sleep, nap, massage) is to “relax”. Better to think of it as recovery and to reinvigorate yourself!
Evolve Strive to enthrall yourself with your progress and strength To what length can you evolve forth? Is there any chord holding you back?
How can you evolve? How can you fly higher, swim further, and go more?
My idea: strive to impress you. Channel your dissatisfaction in a positive way. Allow yourself to go hard all day, everyday, let yourself go cray cray. You’re here to stay. Creative self doubt, just slay.
No need to pray or hope. Just do it now, share your dopeness and authenticity.
You’re strong, focused and raw. Throw your javelin, and dare.
When you see an interesting scene — keep shooting the scene, change up your composition/framing/orientation — and later when you review your photos on your computer, THEN choose your favorite!
What is the root cause of depression? Why do we feel depressed some days, and uplifted other days? Does depression manifest differently in different people?
Is the word “depression” even useful? Let me essay some of my thoughts:
Why travel? For me, traveling isn’t for the sake of traveling. Instead, traveling as a means or a bridge for self-introspection.
When you travel, you finally get the distance away from all the craziness and hecticness in the world. Even the benefit of flying on an airplane without wifi; finally the chance to disconnect — which will open up and free your mind.
When you buy something, it requires much of you. You must take care of it, you must maintain it, you must use it.
You don’t want to just store it, or have it collect dust somewhere. And if it does become unused, you’re gonna one day figure out what to do with it — to throw it away, give it away, or sell it. All require much work. Throwing away (mental, emotional, sentimental guilt). Giving it away — deterring a “worthy†recipient. Selling it — the stress finding a buyer, using time, and coordinating it all, and also getting a fair price.
Invest more money in yourself and experiences. Invest in metaphysical things. Good thing about buying experiences— you store them in your heart and memory, not your garage! You can infinitely hoard memories and experiences inside your mind.
The joy of walking the streets, wandering, interesting with strangers (or not). The joy and delight in being a part of society. The joy of making art works from human beings in urban and public places.
When in doubt, shoot more street. Go to the downtown area more. Travel to more cities. Attempt to shoot more. Get closer. “Work the scene” by shooting more of a scene. Don’t hesitate before clicking, just shoot it!
Seeing beautiful design awakens me, invigorates me, and gives me new hope towards the future. I have a reason to keep on living, to keep witnessing beautiful designs but also to have the motivation to create more of my own beautiful designs!
In American and modern culture, it is all about consumerism, materialism, and obsession with accumulating more — more money, more possessions, fancier cars, fancier possessions and object/tools, more land, more homes, more everything.
All wounds you receive in your life stimulate your recuperative properties in your body.
Thus in life, realize that all the pain, difficulty and suffering you experience in life is actually beneficial to you. The only “bad†thing that happens to us is if we die. Everything else is upside!
In striving to come up with a good definition of street photography, it seems the most simple is the best:
Any photo you shoot in public is a street photograph.
Photo+graph= light drawing.
Street photography as light street drawings. It means you’re using a camera (light capturing device) to make sketches of stuff you see in public places, cities, urban spaces, streets.
In praise of blurry photos, out-of-focus photos, and photos which are ‘imperfect’. Perhaps they better document our memories, emotions, and feelings of a scene — imperfect, gritty, full of movement, and emotional?
What is the practical parts of striving towards knowledge and philosophy? Should it be used as an aid to improve our lives, or to discover knowledge beyond ourselves — knowledge which not benefit ourselves, but maybe future generations of humanity?
Strive to make beautiful products, beautiful websites, beautiful art works, beautiful photos, beautiful forms, shapes, music, and ideas. Transfigure the world with your artistic vision!
This is the impetus behind HAPTIC, ARS, this blog, and everything I do.
It seems that 90%+ of the online economy comes from advertising (Google/Facebook owns the majority). This basically means:
Offer a free service to the user, and derive income from advertising.
Now, I personally have an aversion to advertising. I hate watching TV ads, seeing ads in magazines, or having ‘popup ads’ or banner advertising online.
However– is advertising ‘bad’? What does ‘advertising’ even mean? Some thoughts:
After mucking around with the new macOS Catalina beta on my laptop [and corrupting my hard-drive upon installing a new Beta Update], I did a fresh new install of the OS.
It is great. I feel lighter, more free, and more pumped to create new things. There was great joy in re-installing files and applications I needed. Also, I only re-installed the essential apps, files, and folders. Thus a lot of my old ‘legacy’ apps [that I no longer used]. are no longer on my hard-drive. This means more hard drive space, and my laptop runs faster, and more lean.
Which made me wonder–
Perhaps in life, we should regularly do a fresh new ‘reformatting’ of our mind, possessions, and life in general.
Instead of mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, or flipping through stories, why not scroll through our own photos? Scroll through our own “Media Library” on WordPress, to scroll through our “Camera Roll” on iPhone/iPad, or scroll through our Google Photos app to reinspire ourselves.
It is easy for us to forget our old photos. By constantly re-examining our old photos, we can discover old “hidden gems”, but also edit down our work.
Once you got the thing, you aren’t “happy” anymore. Happiness is the joy of overcoming difficulties, challenges, the joy of battling an obstacle/opponent.
As a photographer you got a trillion things to shoot.
Question — what should I photograph? Meaning — Are there certain subject matter which is more interesting or less interesting to photograph? Are there certain things you shouldn’t photograph?
My epic vision [and the vision of all of us at ARS: Cindy, Kevin, Jun, Annette] is this:
ARS is social media ‘done right’ for photographers.
A social media platform for photographers that isn’t based on advertising, that isn’t a popularity contest, and isn’t based on toying with your emotions. A social media platform which actually EMPOWERS us as photographers and visual artists.
Anti-perfection in art. Just because someone else did it before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt doing it as well (you will always do it differently).
Anti self-criticism. Making art as a creative process, of playing. No finality in your artworks.
To feel guilt in photography is nonsense, and improper of us.
To feel guilt is to let external societal pressures guide our own instincts and intuition.
We should not prioritize the needs of society and others over ourselves. In praise of following our own gut, our own instincts, and obeying our own needs.
![Getting ready for my 'Creative Every Day' presentation at Google [thank you Cindy/Kevin]](https://i1.wp.com/erickimphotography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/R0007643.jpg?ssl=1)
![Henri Neck Strap Mark III [Mahogany Brown]](https://i0.wp.com/erickimphotography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/henri-neck-strap-mark-iii-2.jpg?resize=1500%2C1003&ssl=1)
