Categories
Germany Photography street photography

Discovering the streets of Duesseldorf ~

They say nothing improves without practice… those 10,000 hours.

I have started organizing this meetup group over 15 years ago in shanghai and for the last 5 years here in duesseldorf. We walk the streets almost once a week with cameras, photographing, exchanging tips and experiencing the life of the street.

I love walking alone to do my photography but the group events are just as valuable. Seeing how the same scene can be translated so differently for each photographer reasserts for me the uniqueness of each human and the magic of diversity.

Our next event will be in the streets of Paris! Stay tuned.

You can see more about my meetup group here!

Categories
contemplations Photography shanghai

The things we don’t talk about~

We get so busy with life that we ignore death. We celebrate distractions, the things that make us avoid the question of our own mortality on this planet and all the time treating something as natural as death as we would an avoidable inconvenience.

I wonder if this great fear stems from our lack of education, our inability to handle the unknown, not coming to terms with the inevitable, or the way our lives are more and more based in materialism.

Day 43 of 365~

Images taken somewhere on the Shanghai underground

Categories
art contemplations inspiration Iphone Seoul

We meet ourselves in the least expected places

and we are quite often surprised
and we are quite often surprised at what we see

This image is part of an iphone photography collection I just posted as a separate page on this blog. I have been finding such great freedom in street photography making use of the iphone and finding new creative ways every day for capturing the world around me. Please visit the new page when you have time~ I will be updating it regularly

 

Categories
contemplations inspiration Photography Seoul street

The Way

along the yellow line~ Seoul
along the yellow line~ Seoul

I remember walking as a very young child  in our small mountain village in Lebanon, and just as I passed the old movie theater that used to only play Indian tragedies, an English word popped in my head. At that time, English was quite foreign to me and my vocabulary was extremely limited, yet somehow an adult word appeared: “determined”. I never forgot that word and I only learned its meaning years later as a teenager. It was one of those strange life moments that are very difficult to explain. This little story brings me back always to ‘the way’, and for me there is a way that I know I need to follow if I listen carefully to the same nudging that introduced the word “determined” to me. And as with all good things, the way is never the easy one…

Categories
life New York street Travel

Day 16~ November 16th~ New York

I will meet you in the underground

When you ride the subway trains in New York City everyday with their strong smell, the shrieking brake noise of the arriving trains, the unintelligible speech of the conductors, and the repeating “stand clear of the closing doors”, you beging to feel a sense of belonging in those underground tunnels, almost like a city rat. You pick a spot that is convenient for you stand in each day while you wait for the train, you decide weather you are in the mood to look for a seat or simply just stand, and the train ride becomes a kind of a meditation. I always loved people watching while on the subway, and trying to imagine the stories behind each face while trying hard to keep mine anonymous.