Dear friend,

Since dropping STREET NOTES, PHOTO JOURNAL, FILM NOTES, and STREET HUNT — we are very excited to share with you our newest creation:

TRAVEL NOTES

More options, more stress, more distractions.

In praise of “choice minimalism” of living.

In today’s world, assuming you have the means— why would you ever buy a gasoline car?

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.

Be extremely selective and picky about what you buy and admit into your life. Only buy what you can imagine using for an eternity.

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.

A lesson:

Generally in life, more and bigger is worse.

Let me explain.

Beyond “virtue signaling”— virtue flexing.

For many of us, we strive to retire, become “financially independent” and “location independent”. It seems the modern form of success is to become a “digital nomad”.

But once you achieve all this — then what?

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An encouraging idea to start this week:Whatever ‘imperfect’ art you make is perfect!

What I mean is this:

In our lives, we are often discouraged to create artwork because we think:

If my artwork isn’t “good”, it isn’t worth doing.

However this is my thought:

It doesn’t matter if it is good or bad, just make it!

The fact that YOU made it makes it legitimate and good!

It is pretty obvious that at this point, we are all always on our devices [phones, laptops, etc]. Is this a bad thing?

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!

What makes visual art so fun and great —

The excitement to witness and create new forms, shapes, colors, and combinations!

For example my impetus in photography:

The excitement to witness new things, new scenes, new combinations, and to create NEW types of images!

Thinking about materialism and consumerism:

Much of the things we purchase is in order to ‘flex’ our personal possessions. To assert our status, richness, power, etc.

Questions:

1. Is flexing ‘bad’?
2. Why flex?
3. What would a world without flexing be?
4. Is flexing ‘good’?

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!

For car design, McLaren and Lamborghini.

Expression = ex+press the artistic power from within yourself outwards.

I’d prefer the term “outpression”— pressing outwards (from inside yourself) your creative and artistic power and force.

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.

Now a simple question —

Is this bad?

My thoughts:

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An infinite amount of ways you can approach photography:

How I choose photos I like:

A maxim from our buddy Nietzsche.

The basic idea:

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!

PHILOSOPHY BY KIM >

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.

A thought:

Is it possible we can direct our own self-evolution within a single lifetime? [our lifetime]

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Where does our personal strength and energy come from?

Create your own ‘stories’, by just using your own website/blog to document your everyday experiences.

Blogging as a tool to reflect on your experiences, to digest them, and to derive more joy from them!

Thus blogging is a process of:

1. Memory assimilation
2. Personal growth and evolution
3. Reflection/meditation
4. Augmented intelligence

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:

A thought from our buddy Nietzsche [Twilight of the Idols]:

Live your life (today) as you would desire to live again forever.

You make the rules. The photo or image isn’t sacred.

Feel free to remix, modify, or alter the image however you desire.

To play is to be human.

A thought:

Too much focus on being overly frugal and economical is bad.

What triggers you to make photos?

Currently the RICOH GR III is the best ‘standalone’ digital camera on the market. Superior to all competitors, including Leica Q2.

A thought —

How do we actually “motivate” ourselves in life? Where does the power and energy of motivation come from?

This is also tied to ideas on free will.

Perhaps a principle to life and our personal evolution and thriving:

Never stop sharing.

The problem with technology now:

Technology is too focused on data, ‘efficiency’, ‘optimization’, and all these nerdy things.

What should technology be doing for us? Making us MORE ARTISTIC, more curious, and more child-like.

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.

Nature: going outdoors, on hikes, fresh air; good for the soul.

Even though we are mostly city folk, I think the hybrid of extreme city and extreme nature is a good one.

So us as street photographers, let us also venture more forth into nature and use our photographic skills there as well.

What is a good direction to take your life?

Direct your own personal evolution.

A simple way to think about and approach life:

Only dedicate your energies on things you care for.

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?

An idea I got from my buddy Ryan from Backyard Brew in Palo Alto:

Perhaps the best way to live life is directly. To think about your personal ‘end game’, and attack it directly.

A simple way to approach blogging, sharing, or publishing online:

Just share your own life experiences and journey with others.

It ain’t a matter whether your life is ‘interesting’ or ‘boring’. Just keep it direct, unfiltered, uncensored, and true:

When analyzing your photos or the photos of others, integrate ‘Bounding Boxes’ [in red] to think about the spacing/composition of your photo:

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A thought:

Perhaps we should focus on tiny (incremental), 1% improvements everyday (no breaking the chain).

Currently reading the ‘What happened to the future?’ essay on Founders Fund, and trying to think:

What is the future of photography?

I don’t know about you, but I hate banner-based advertising on blogs and websites.

The practical question is:

How do you monetize a blog WITHOUT using advertising?

Thoughts:

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.

ERIC

It seems we are are obsessed with growth. But my questions:

What is “growth”? Why is it so desirable? And how does one actually “grow”?

Don’t worry about it being a “good” or “bad” photo in the eyes of others. Instead, select your photos based on whether YOU like the photo or not.

If you’re not sure whether the photo is good or not, upload it to arsbeta.com

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.

When we blame ourselves, essentially we are signaling to ourselves that we’re too weak to change things. “Blame” is essentially signaling of who has power.

When you blame others for certain conditions of your life, you’re saying that they have more power than you, and that they have power over you.

By putting 100% responsibility on yourself, this is quite liberating. It means we have 100% power and aren’t dependent on anyone or anything else.

A photo idea: document 24 hours of your own day!

What I think we desire to do as artists:

Create [more] beautiful things!

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Hey streettogs,

Happy Friday! I wanted to start sending you some more email newsletters to hopefully keep your mind full of ‘turbo thoughts’, and also to keep you more inspired in your photography. I’m currently loving the new RICOH GR III [I highly encourage you to order one], and want to share some of this new-spring of photographic inspiration with you.

Photography is fascinating because it is supposed to be a ‘factual’ depiction of reality. Thus, to somehow ‘fuck’ with a photograph seems to be immoral. Why? It loses its ‘authenticity’.

The RICOH GR III is easily easily easily the best camera ever made [thus far] for street photography.

All photography is good photography, but I still think street photography is the best:

Photography and nothing but photography!

Reduce friction in your life in order to maximize what you truly desire to do.

Simple ideas:

1. Wear the same outfit everyday: All black everything. All merino wool everything. Same pair of shoes everyday. One less thing to worry about. (Steve Jobs same turtleneck, and Mark Z with same grey shirt).
2. One camera, one lens: RICOH GR III, ERIC KIM NECK STRAP MARK II and call it a day.
3. Simpler is better. Use the absolute simples tool for the task possible. For blogging, just use your phone or iPad. For writing, just use IA WRITER and Markdown to keep your ideas and words flowing.
4. JPEG: Simplify your photographic workflow. Just shoot JPEG, to speed up and expedite your photographic workflow. JPEG > RAW.
5. At the gym, stick to simple workouts. Deadlift, squat, dumbbell press, chin-ups.
6. For cooking, keep it simple. I find that eggs are the ultimate food. Super cheap to buy, easy to store, and cook super fast. I usually will eat 10-12 whole eggs (yes, with the yolks too), everyday at around 8pm.

A life without photography or art isn’t a life worth living.

When I don’t walk around all day, leave the house all day, or have the opportunity to engage in any physical activity– my brain, mind, and soul gets strange. But the second I leave the house, walk around the block a few times, go lift weights at the gym, commute and hang out somewhere, my mental issues dissipate.

Which makes me wonder:

What if much of our “mental” issues were rooted in the physiological (pertaining to our physical body)?

Composition and boxes are really interesting to me.

Is there an “ideal” way to compose a box, series of boxes, or a rectangle?