Jim Goldberg’s exhibition at SFMOMA is a wonderfully thought provoking and inspiring piece. I encourage you all to go visit the newly museum (which is amazing did I mention?)
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Today's Document
Mike Driver

No title available
DEAR READER
Xuebing Du
dirt enthusiast
NASA
YOU ARE THE REASON
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
No title available
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER

pixel skylines

Love Begins
One Nice Bug Per Day
almost home
Sade Olutola
wallacepolsom

tannertan36
seen from Brazil

seen from Singapore

seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia

seen from Australia

seen from United States
seen from Brazil

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye

seen from Norway
seen from Argentina

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Brazil

seen from Malaysia
@nisesen
Jim Goldberg’s exhibition at SFMOMA is a wonderfully thought provoking and inspiring piece. I encourage you all to go visit the newly museum (which is amazing did I mention?)
Totally solicited redesigns of the IndieGoGo website
indiegogo.com
Dorm room view of Oakland, 2014-2015
Unit 2, Griffiths Floor 6, Room 614
2014
27 worldwide street photographers book
Good read, and free. Check it out.
Fun times with the Cal DB crew over spring break. Travelling is always more fun with friends.
Berkeley → Grand Canyon → Zion → Bryce Canyon → Arches → Berkeley
I’m also excited to announce that I’ll be working at Massdrop this summer as a software engineering intern! I’ll also be visiting SF a lot more this summer, so I’ll be posting more pictures
Some new branding and typography for my future site!
[WIP] Dragon Boat Rostering App
Design Mockups for login, profile landing, and roster sheet views
Cal Dragon Boat welcomes its newest set of newbies for Spring 2016!
(1.1.16-1.4.16) Day 9-13 - Asakusa, Sumida
Apologies for the late post; I had to work up the motivation to edit these pictures. Now that I have I’ve finished wondering what I was trying to do with this little travel diary in the first place. At first I thought it was therapy for me, but now I realize it’s much more than that. When I’m older and wondering where my life went I can hopefully come back here and remember just how lucky I was to travel the world, and to visit Japan. Even if I end up a poor man I’ll at least have a wealth of memories!
--
Our hostel is in Asakusa so we decide to walk the area because the place is packed. There must be a million people on the streets today, making their visits to the shrine for the year. It’s too crowded to visit the inner temple complex so we walk around the outer streets, taking in the sights and sounds. The Skytree in the background is a new addition from the last time I visited the city, taking up the western side of the sky. After eating our fill of food, Kevin and I walk towards Sumida and the Skytree, hoping to find a place with less people. Bad decision, because when we got there the ticketmaster told us we’d have to wait until 7:00PM to visit the top of the skytree. Families, small children, couples, and single looking men and women walk around the drone of thousands of people lining the inner tower complex and the shopping mall below.
Both Kevin and I are surprised to see an ice skating rink near the base of the Skytree, and so we both decide to stand near the barrier and watch people skate. I was expecting to see someone trying to show off but everyone there seemed to be a first time skater. With a sort of passive amusement I watched kids and adults alike tumble and fall, only to get up and do it again. I said something to Kevin, about how when we were young children we’d never be afraid of hurting ourselves, and I recalled the times my family would go climbing boulders in the desert, and I would fearlessly jump over rock crevices and swing off the tops of the mounds while my parents would move cautiously and slowly. Nowadays I’m scared of getting hurt, and I try to do everything a bit slower than I used to. It’s probably because I have that lingering fear of dying before I do something important, but that’s not even my biggest problem right now, so why am I worried about that?
With nothing left to do in Sumida, Kevin and I take the train to Shinjuku for the x-teenth time. I somehow decide that I want to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the second time, except in a Japanese movie theatre. We both buy tickets from an automated machine, except I somehow end up buying the student ticket, despite knowingly leaving my Cal 1 card at home. The kid at the entrance of the theater is exasperated when I can’t produce my card, but decides that negotiating with me in broken English is out of his pay range, and lets us in. I don’t really know what happened the rest of the night (I think we got udon at a stand in Memory Lane), but I did learn that Japanese people will always sit through the entire movie credits, as their way of acknowledging the efforts of the cast and crew. I made a mental note that I’d try to do that from now on, even though I know my limited patience won’t allow it.
If you sneeze at a building and it collapses, it was probably a pretty shitty building to begin with.
from Reddit
(12.29.15-12.30.15) Day 7/8 - Nara, Nagoya, Tokyo
As I travel I realize that my pictures are becoming more and more messy and more chaotic. I’m okay with this, because that’s what life is like. An artist whom I really admire once said this:
“I used to strive to take the perfect picture and occasionally I was able to... about three times a year, but what I eventually found out was that perfect pictures are actually fucking boring because they are just that – perfect- and there is nothing else to comment upon- people see them, automatically think “Oh, that’s pretty”, and then move on... There is no room for flexibility for seeing things differently. But like people, if there is a flaw, it is something you can hold onto and remember, whether it's good, charming, or terrible... and that in a way defines, at least for people, who we are and reveals the most about us… and that’s the beauty of it. I remember when I was a student in college, there was a substitute teacher who had a sixth finger protruding out of his pinky; and I’m sure that because of the freakishness of his finger, it eventually led him to raise a tank full of cockroaches in his office on the 7th floor of our building, which was really disgusting to see in person… but the cockroaches and his finger were also so strange and uniquely awesome that I could have never imagined something like that on my own… which is also why he is the only teacher that I remember fondly or with any excitement at all.”
The artist in question is Patrick Tsai. His work is below at
www.hellopatpat.com
(12.29.15) Day 7 - Nara
もち (mochi) making in Nara
Watching these guys pound mochi is very therapeutic. If they could keep going I’d stay there for hours just watching that green blob get pounded...
edit: does that sound dirty?
Photography resembles sex: reading and talking about it is great, but doing it counts. Get out there and do it.
- Bill Owens, “Documentary Photography: A Personal View,” 1978
(12.28.15) Day 6 - Shin-Osaka
I lost my bottle of lotion somewhere in Kyoto, so I ended up putting some chapstick on my face to make my dry skin feel better. The rest of the day I was too busy being overwhelmed by all the shops and food stalls to remember what happened as we walked around.
Kevin and I ended up getting really drunk around Shinsaibashidera because I was angry at what one of my other friends had said to me earlier today. While we were in one of the bars we visited that night we saw a man on a date with a cute girl, both of whom had had a fair amount to drink. Even as she showed all the signs that she desired him and his attention all he seemed to do was stare at his phone and occasionally mumble a few words in response to her. What on that phone could possibly be so interesting that he was willing to ignore the woman right in front of him? Anyways, that got Kevin and I pretty riled up.
Things would be going differently if I were that guy, we both thought out loud.
Slow day in Osaka, but I saw this lady walking her pet rabbit, with a leash.
Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
Yukio Mishima , After The Banquet
(12.27.15) Day 5 - Kiyomizu-Dera Shrine
I usually don’t look forward to Sundays because I know that Monday inevitably comes next. Today feels different though. No one is here in the hostel so I can listen to my own music and clean up at my own pace. I forgot a few articles of clothing in Tokyo several nights before, so I’m actually in desperate need of new underwear and a t-shirt. The air is crisp and tastes good when I leave, so I decide to walk to Lawson to eat and then visit UNIQLO at Kyoto Station so I can grab some cheap clothes to wear. As I’m eating a pre-packaged sandwich and drinking hot tea the morning sun warms my face and gives me happy thoughts. It’s a rare moment of actual peace, and I savor it because I don’t think it will happen again for a long time.
I got to spend the day with my friend and her family. She told me the night before that she would model for me in a kimono, which made me very excited. She’s in crutches from a skiing related injury, so she uses my arm for a crutch as we walk around the shrine, which actually works out fine because it makes us look like a couple. I’m actually really happy that she’s okay relying on me like this, because for the day I can feel like I’m a somewhat dependable person.
After spending a few hours in Kiyomizu-dera her family and I go to Kyoto station and eat dinner, where they again treat me. In a lot of ways, her parents act and talk like mine, which makes me like them a lot. When dinner is over, we split up and my friend and I leave the station to visit Yodobashi Camera down the street. It’s a pretty overwhelming place. I (sort of) help her pick out new headphones, which she gets very excited about. While she’s off looking at all the cool things, I think about my week, and then the past month, and eventually the entire year as it had gone by. It is now December 29th, and as the new year comes around I think about how quickly the year had passed, and it scares me a little.
The past year has been the craziest year of my life. I’ve met so many new people that I love, a few that I dislike, and many that I don’t have an opinion of. I’ve struggled and failed some in classes, but I’ve also done well in others. Someone once told me that these four years would simultaneously be the best and worst times of my life, and just three short semesters later, I think I’m starting to understand what she meant. I’ve been growing up a lot this past year. What I have learned is that no matter how bad the struggle is, the most important thing you can do is accept your failures and improve from there. I have also learned that even if you like someone and you know they won’t like you back, it’s okay because these feelings can teach you to become a better person. It’s taken a long time for me to see this, but now I know that if you really care about someone, all you want for them is to be happy - and if that person is happy, then you are too. Showing my friend around Kyoto today and seeing her have a good time really made me happy in the most wonderful way.