I was in Tokyo a couple of weeks back for a short 6 days. Besides the event I covered for work, I was there for a second reason: to take as many photos as possible for future use in the photography section of the magazine I write for.
Even though I started with my first manual SLR and digital camera in the late 90s, I hadn’t taken photography seriously since I left school. But it’s something I’ve been really getting into lately. I pushed myself in Tokyo to take better pictures than I’d taken before, and I’d like to share a few I’m particularly pleased with.
Note: I shot everything with a Canon EOS 7D with a kit 18-135mm lens, which was on loan from Canon (and is a dream of a camera).
Chris was our tour guide during the event days. I first met him last year during a similar trip to Tokyo, he’s from Taiwan and speaks fluent Mandarin, Hokkien, Japanese and English. A funny guy, and I love the way he was standing in the rain with the twin umbrellas as he tried to herd us into the bus.
I like this one, but this is one of the rare few shots of architecture I shot this time round. Before I left for the trip, I looked through the photos that I’d shot in Tokyo last year, and most of them were of inanimate objects; architecture, abstracts and still life. I realized that I’d grown used to shooting photos like that and I wanted to challenge myself this time round to shoot differently.
Something I need to get off my chest.
A year ago, I made the announcement to give all profits from Life Coaches Blog away to Conservation International. It’s not millions – LCB makes pocket change, especially after I closed it. But still, pretty cool right? Make money, give it away, save the Earth, be an awesome human being.
Well, things changed. I’m keeping the cash, planet Earth.
This issue of being deserving is something I’ve wrestled with for a long, long time. Do I deserve to have the things I want? Do I deserve to profit handsomely from my contributions? Do I deserve to look good, get awards, be praised? You’d think the answer is an easy fuck, yeah to all these questions, but it hasn’t always been easy for me. Years of undervaluing my work and overworking myself. The very fact that I have to think about whether or not I should get paid for stuff I did is, well.
So. Long way of saying: I deserve to keep the money I make from the work I did. I want it. It’ll help me make my life better and happier. It feels right. It feels good. So I’m doing it. I’m keeping the profits I make from LCB for myself.
What About the Pandas?
Yes, but what about the pandas?
After making this decision, I finally understood what someone tried to tell me years ago about contribution.
Why do I spend weeks on a blog post writing and editing it until I publish it?
The answer’s simple: it’s fun to spend time making something as good as I can make it before I show it to the world. And in a world where deadlines are the norm, taking the time to craft something until I’m happy with it is a pleasure. Because it matters to me that this is about creating something I can be proud of, and presenting that to the world in a way that is good.
The Japanese distinguish between two kinds of quality: atarimae hinshitsu – the idea that things work as they should, and miryokuteki hinshitsu – aesthetic quality on top of atarimae hinshitsu. What I want to do is to write posts that don’t just communicate, but communicate beautifully.