Luck

Google tells me that Thomas Edison said "There is no substitute for hard work". And I am sure lots of people put relentless effort as the top virtue for success. But I will have to disagree.Hard work and relentless effort may be the foundation but you simply need the luck on your side to be successful beyond normal measure. It could be meeting right people at the right time at the right place. It could be adding wrong ingredient by mistake which turns out to be great tasting recipe. In this case, it was the man in the photo, a friend of mine, turning his flashlight on for a few seconds. I was going for long exposure and at first I thought the shot was ruined due to the flashlight. But, bam! It came out much better than what I had in mind. A total luck. 

Don't get me wrong. You do have to be out there in the ass freezing windy weather in the middle of the night to be able to get lucky =). Only the people who are well prepared will get to enjoy the benefit of luck.

Mask

This shot was taken at Union Square in San Francisco with 35mm B&W film. In the midst of busy crowd on a Saturday, he was right there by himself. One man crew. And he was very conscious about his surroundings as he constantly looked around. Whether due to the sunlight or as part of his act, he had this frowny face. And that irony made me start clicking as he started at me.


As I got older, I began to realize most of people wear masks and I am no exception. And it seems like I have always been wearing a mask or many of them throughout my entire life. However, I don't think I had a mask on when I was born so there must have been a period when I started covering my true self selectively. When was it? When could've I started wearing one. I believe it was when I moved back from Libya to Korea when I was 10 years old. From attending a school with about 40 students to suddenly being put in a school with thousands of students, I guess I was subconsciously shielding myself selectively revealing myself. I wasn't judged before in the old environment and in the new environment it was all about comparing and judging others. Pure peer pressure like in a jungle...


These days are constant battle for me to throw off any mask I subconsciously try to put on. Simply because I came to realize whatever others might think of you is quite irrelevant for your own happiness. Their opinions if genuine will matter and should be of some value to you. But most cases they are just their own subjective opinion with no factual bases. So what's the point of caging yourself under the mask?

First ever print

This was my very first print that I developed myself in the darkroom. The shot was taken in downtown San Jose, right in front of Martin Luther King Jr. Library.

An Indian family with father, mother and a son was standing together. As the father was handing out fliers about some spiritual gathering, the son was playing the little tabla and singing at the same time. I approached the father and asked whether it's okay to take the picture, which is the hardest part in street photography because once people realize there is a lens pointing at them, most of the time it can ruin the naturalness of the moment and won't get the shot you want. Later on, I learned to just take a shot first and ask them afterwards and if they don't want, you can delete it in front of them. 

I didn't know about filtering system on the enlarger so you don't see much contrast in this picture. However, at the moment when my first ever image popped up in the developer, I felt such a thrilling joy. My emotion at that moment is sealed together with this photo.