09.09.2011

Facing the Human Impact on Nature and Life

I was traveling by train from Hualien in Taiwan in the late afternoon on my way back to Taipei in 2007. Fortunately, I was able to make a few photographs like the one below before the light out the window quickly disappeared making it pointless to try to capture anything while in a fast moving train.
Taiwan Countryside by Train

Behind the lens: I’m not a fan of tilt-shift or lensbaby effects that makes photo scenes look like a miniature world though I find it interesting that the photograph I made while in a moving train has a bit of the same effect without using such lenses.

As I sat back in my seat with the view of the green countryside and the vast mountains in the distance, I was shocked to find some different kind of mountains coming into my view from the window. Two industrial mountains of technology (maybe about 15 ft high) seemingly from First World countries and a few people among the high hills of e-waste who were clearly not equipped to be around those materials. I saw a woman walking among the tall mounds whom I can only assume had the duty of sifting through it.

I have seen images of our technology garbage piled high shipped off to other countries in the news and such like:

But actually having seen it for myself… it changes you.

I will never forget that feeling I had when I saw what I saw. The disbelief, the sadness, and the urge to show what I saw even in that short span of time. I’ve always wanted to go back and make photographs of that harsh reality caused by our lifestyles of excess. Maybe someday I will be able to find that place once again… the place that also made me realize that photography can show more and do more.

I recently learned of Chris Jordan (from Chase Jarvis) and his photography work in highlighting the human impact on nature and life. It’s unbelievable. It’s sad. It’s powerful.

And the story behind his work:

“We all have to grow our hearts big enough and expand our minds big enough and face the realities we live in.” —Chris Jordan

09.07.2011

Gifting Memories

Do you remember when they met?

When did we have brunch together that day when we met? Was it 2007… or maybe it was 2006?

I know! Check our old email messages! There must’ve been an email about it.

There we stood at the wine store, pacing back and forth poking at our iPhones trying to find the email we may or may not have gotten about meeting up for brunch to meet our friend’s new guy.

I’m not a big fan of giving gift certificates or money (though I absolutely don’t mind receiving them myself) because I like to add some creativity to gifts, especially meaningful and/or practical gifts. I think it’s related to the photographer in me where I like to gift memories whether it be an experience or items that can conjure up memories or create new ones.

For our wine loving friends, we had already decided on giving them a wine blending experience and a few bottles of wine from the same vineyard as something they could actually open for an engagement gift. I then suggested that we specifically find wine from the year our dear friends met.

Ravenswood Vintage Wines Engagement Gift

Great idea, right? BUT it was so difficult to remember the year because it seemed like forever since we all knew them as a couple and it seemed so foreign that there was a time when they weren’t together. After several lifeline phone calls with our other friends recounting the details of group outings and trips and pacing too many times back and forth in the store, we concluded that it was 2006 and were finally on our way out of the store.

And so we put together an engagement gift package that included the wine blending seminar certificate with wine from 2006: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Zinfandel.

We picked Ravenswood for the blending seminar and wine. They were a pleasure to work with in making gift arrangements for our friends and even let us design and print our own certificate.

The gift package seemed to need a bit more variety, so we found ourselves browsing the food aisles at Cost Plus World Market for ideas to add to the wine themed gift. Their Brix Chocolate for Wine (Dark and Extra Dark Chocolate) and wine infused salami (Volpi’s Chianti, Pinot Grigio and Rosé Salami) seemed like a perfect complement!

Wine Themed Engagement Gift

I’m told they did not last long and they wanted to know where they could get more of the chocolate! Success!

08.30.2011

Celebrating an Engagement at Town Hall: Larry + Tim

There are many people who cross our paths in our lives. And sometimes we get to cross paths once. Twice, if we’re lucky. Some people call it serendipity. Others call it fate.

Larry and Tim rode the same San Francisco Muni bus to work in the mornings and although they saw each other on the bus, they never officially met and didn’t know each others’ name. Until… MySpace made their paths cross in a different way… when Tim’s picture randomly popped up on Larry’s screen while he was on MySpace. And before we knew it, Larry and Tim were introducing each other to their friends and family as more than friends. It was like a movie.

I’ve known Larry since high school and he’s always made school look effortless – studying minimally yet earning a fair amount of not just As, but A+s. I have no doubt he breezed through two of the nation’s top universities, even being given a leadership award from UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Larry, during his Engineering graduation, represented his class by giving the department a check from the class’ fundraising effort. On top of that, he received an award after graduation for the general fundraising work he did while at UC Berkeley. And in Larry’s spare time, he teaches a test preparation class. Tim’s also an academic – a PhD candidate at the time. Now that he’s got his PhD in Education, we can call him Dr. Tim. Oh and in his spare time while working on his dissertation, Dr. Tim helped start a non-profit organization, too!

I still remember when some of us were introduced to Tim at brunch one day. Seemingly not intimidated by the situation of meeting several of Larry’s friends, he was calm and cool and won our hearts. Smart, silly and stylish together with a love of food and wine and cooking, these two accomplished scholars are perfectly made for each other. It may have been serendipity that initially brought them together, but in the end it must be fate!

I was honored to be invited to celebrate their engagement at Town Hall in San Francisco last September. The dinner was held in the private dining room on the second floor.

Each table was adorned with beautiful fall inspired centerpieces made by a friend of theirs.

Table Arrangements and Settings - Town Hall - San Francisco, CA

It felt like a wedding reception, rather than an engagement party… they sure know how to throw a party!

The evening began with a cocktail and hors d’oeuvres hour and followed with a delicious three course meal:

First Course
Lemon cucumber and heirloom tomato salad, feta cheese, niçoise olives, lemon vinaigrette
Tuna tartare with fried green tomato and green onion Tabasco vinaigrette

First Course - Town Hall - San Francisco, California

Entrée
Filet mignon with potato puree, mushrooms, corn and bordelaise
Blackened Atlantic salmon with white corn mace choux, okra, red wine sauce

Dessert
Campfire s’mores tart, Scharffenberger chocolate, salted caramel marshmallow, house made grahams
(Served with Blue Bottle French Press Coffee)

Dessert: Campfire s'mores tart, Scharffenberger chocolate, salted caramel marshmallow, house made grahams - Town Hall - San Francisco, California

As close friends and family toasted to their happiness, watery eyes quickly filled the room as friends and family shared about how much Larry and Tim had touched their lives and taught a thing or two (actually several) about what it means to love.
» Read the rest of this entry …

08.14.2011

You Must Have a Fantastic Camera

Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L

Let me explain. It’s because of computers…

I had gone through two computers by the time I graduated from high school. My first one didn’t have a hard drive and my second one did, but was accessorized with an external modem sometime later.

By the time I started college, I was on my third computer, a klunky yet then new laptop that cost $4000 that I paid with my own money that I had saved up from working a few jobs and some red envelope money. It had a wired Internet connection through a card I plugged in. $4000 was a lot of money, but to me I got a fast laptop with awesome features that would hopefully last me for a long time… hopefully through four years of college. (Plus, my friend made me feel better when he spent $5000 on his Apple laptop!)

Technology has been everywhere and so much a part of my work and daily life. I’ve spent my time providing support for computers and advising on what to buy. My tech friends and colleagues try to get ahead of the game with Moore’s law which says that your computer becomes obsolete… like yesterday. For the most part, we want to maximize what our money can buy.

I’m the same when it comes to cameras.

Mostly.

“A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said ‘I love your pictures – they’re wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.’ He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: “That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove.” — Sam Haskins

I agree that “it’s not about the gear” and I know that getting a better camera will not suddenly make me a better photographer. One of my photographer instructors would say, “The best camera is the one you’ll use.” However, the tools do make it easier for me to use the techniques I do know. There are almost always workarounds, but the alternative may take more time or the situation may not allow me to use those workarounds.
» Read the rest of this entry …

08.04.2011

Why I Am A WanderLust

These three amazing short films pretty much sum up why I love to travel.

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

The 3 guys took 44 days, traveling 11 countries with 18 flights, logging 38 thousand miles. They used 2 cameras and generated almost a terabyte of footage to create this great imagery.

Makes me want to go out and wander again.

Words and photographs cannot describe how much traveling has changed who I am today.

05.11.2011

50 Years and the Power of an Image

Ma, isn’t there a temple near here? I said to my mom (in Cantonese) as we were walking around District 5 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam last year. I was thinking of the temple we had visited the last time we were in Vietnam… the temple where my grandfather’s ashes had been laid to rest.

She answered my question with an Ay?, a little surprised by where we found ourselves and then she started walking towards a side street. I followed her wondering where we were going. We went down an alley with a dead end. I was confused, but before I had a chance to ask my mom, she exclaimed three Chinese words with short pauses between each word as if she was counting 1-2-3. Even more confused, I realized she was saying the words to a woman sitting in front of a door in the alley. The woman, after a short pause, widened her eyes and replied in the same pronounced manner with three different Chinese words I recognized this time… my mother’s Chinese name.

This was my mother’s childhood friend. Whom she hadn’t seen or talked to in over 50 years! Yet the way they greeted each other was as if it had been much shorter than that. And my mom remembered exactly where her friend had lived over 50 years ago, next to the temple.

While sitting in small red plastic chairs, I sat with them outside the home as they recounted their lives and caught up with each other and everything that has happened since the War and since my mom left the country.

Home - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

And then, the friend went back inside her home and came out with photographs… photographs over 50 years old.

The photographs were of their friends including my mom… some were posed athletic team photos, some were candid, and some were wedding photos. They talked and laughed over the photographs… about the good ol’ times, their lives as friends, their other friends in the photos, and what became of their friends and their families especially after the War, the weddings and deaths, piecing together the missing timelines of each others’ lives which they couldn’t be a part of. I was moved that such photographs were bringing back memories as vividly as if it were just a week ago. Seeing what was unfolding before me, I even started taking photographs of them while they reminisced and fast forwarded through their half a century worth of life experiences in the middle of the alley in the red plastic chairs… new memories being created from old memories, a new cycle.

50 Year Old Photographs - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Many months later, Bambi Cantrell said the following during her CreativeLIVE online photography workshop on Posing & Lighting:

When your parents are deceased, your grandparents are deceased, your sister is deceased, and many of the people that you have loved and known throughout your life are no longer around, that’s when pictures become treasures to you because that’s what we have left of those people and so I think that it’s really important for us to document those wonderful people that come in and out of our lives and that I think family pictures especially are extremely important, not to us as much as they are to our children and the generations that come after us.

And the cool thing that we have the ability to do today that they didn’t have 100 years ago… when we look at pictures of our grandparents from 100 years ago, we can tell by looking at them very few things… we can tell what they wore, we can tell maybe whether they were rich or poor, but we could tell nothing about their personalities. You see, today, we have the wonderful privilege of not only documenting what a person wore on their wedding day, and the fact that they had a wedding cake, and that they danced at the reception. We have the opportunity and the privilege of being able to document who they were and all of the wonderful nuances that made them those quirky people that they were… because we are where we are in the scheme of time, we have that wonderful privilege of going farther and documenting the human spirit, not just the shell of that person.

I wanted to shout Amen at the computer screen as she said this! There is a reason why one of the first items people take are photographs when they have to evacuate their home. There is a reason why my mom, when she left her country, had hardly anything in her possession once she got to the United States, but did have a stack of photographs of her friends, her family, and her wedding.

And it was the old photographs of a parent who had unexpectedly passed away without having a chance to say goodbye that gave me great comfort and happy memories to reminisce when needing to select photographs for the funeral… and there was unexpected relief to have that one recent family portrait that didn’t seem as important to take at the time because there was supposed to always be time to take them later.

Recently, I saw Chase Jarvis’ post on The Power of an Image:

A photograph – an image – is an incredibly powerful thing. It can be a tool, intentionally or incidentally. It can tell an entire story of a month, year, decade, or a generation, captured in perhaps just 1/1000 of a second. An image [can] change a life, end a war, start a riot, bring someone joy, inspire a revolution, open or close a debate. An image can move the world.

As I experimented a bit with video last year or so, especially with the new DSLRs that can capture amazing HD crisp quality photo, I found that I (as Chase puts it) “still respect and value for the 130 year old concept of a photo” and often even more so than a video. It’s the 1/1000th of a second capture of time that freezes a story and emotion that captivates me, a split second in time that you may not otherwise easily notice in moving images. It’s the power of a fleeting moment that may never return again. To be remembered over a half century later.

This is why I love photographs and why I create them.

04.24.2011

Unexpected at Joe’s of Westlake

Ceiling Light Fixture @ Joe's of Westlake, Daly City

I’ve always passed by it and wondered what it was like on the inside. The exterior always kind of gave an impression that it was an oldie. So one night last year, while looking for some place to eat for dinner, I had a chance to finally try it.

The brown interior did look oldish, like a transportation back in time, but near the front door, there was a lounge and bar area which seemed like a neat and comforting place to hang out and watch some sports.

Since I was going through the Jasmine Star Wedding Photography CreativeLIVE Workshop, I had brought my DSLR with me, on the prowl to look for an interesting photograph and the light fixture in the ceiling caught my eye, unexpectedly (photo above).

I got the Tortellone Napoletana which I didn’t like so much mainly because the texture of the filling was too fine and ground up:
Tortellone Napoletana @ Joe's of Westlake, Daly City

And we tried the calamari (something I tend to do any time I see calamari on a menu). It satisfied our hunger.
Calamari @ Joe's of Westlake, Daly City

02.14.2011

Love and the Beauty of Life

I was in elementary school and we were going on a field trip! Field trips were always exciting to me because it meant we were going to go out and do something instead of stay inside the classroom. Our teacher passed out a piece of paper and I had a pencil and then we were set free to explore… and write down the answers to the questions on the worksheet.

I remember the crocodiles, the two headed snake, the pendulum showing that the earth rotates, the earthquake simulator, the planetarium exhibit where you got to stand on a scale and see how much you would weigh on the different planets. And there was the touch tidepool… where you could touch all sorts of living sea creatures. There was the exhibit showing all the organisms in a droplet of sea water and I still think about it every time I go into the ocean like the time I unexpectedly fell into the water while jetskiing off Maui and accidentally swallowed a bunch of water or the time I was scuba diving for the first time in the Great Barrier Reef and in practicing how to breathe underwater with the scuba gear, I instead drank a motherload of super salty Australian ocean water and microscopic sea friends to go with.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been to the California Academy of Sciences in my childhood, but when they closed for renovation, I was curious to find out what they did with the place that was such a big part of my exploration as a kid. So I went on opening day back in 2008, but there were so many people that they ran out of tickets and I got to see the building from the De Young Museum instead.

California Academy of Sciences Building

It took me about 1.5 years and three tries to take these photos and see most of the new Academy. And did you know… that the California Academy of Sciences is actually a research institution? Years ago, a friend of mine told me this and I was surprised because I had always thought it was just a museum, just exhibits.

A few months after my first attempt, I was able actually go inside, but unfortunately wasn’t early enough to pick up planetarium tickets (and it was only an hour after the Academy had opened). But I was enamored with the sea life and the jellyfish…

Clear Jellyfish, California Academy of Sciences

This one in particular reminds me of a UFO.

Clear Jellyfish, California Academy of Sciences

Their shapes are so fascinating.

Varieties of Jellyfish, California Academy of Sciences

(I hear that there’s a Jellyfish Lake in Palau which must be a beautiful sight to see.)

Of course, there are fish to see. Lots and lots of colorful ones.

Colorful Fish, California Academy of Sciences

And this caught my eye. It’s art in life… living and simply beautiful.

Life as Art, California Academy of Sciences

And my favorite pendulum.

Pendulum, California Academy of Sciences

And the Rainforest Dome which is new to the Academy… also really hot and humid in there.

Rainforest Dome, California Academy of Sciences

On a separate occasion, my cousin was visiting and we went to the Academy for their Nightlife event. Music, drinks, and exploring life… it’s like science geek meets cool.

Lots of more pretty fish to admire.

Fish Diptych, California Academy of Sciences

And I was mesmerized by the orange jellyfish and with the blue background, they were just stunning.

Orange Jellyfish Triptych, California Academy of Sciences

When I was a kid, I thought the California Academy of Sciences was a cool place. Now, each visit to the Academy has also reminded me of how beautiful life is, especially through my own camera lens.

Happy Valentine’s Day! From the cuddly penguins.

Cuddly Penguins, California Academy of Sciences