Photography

For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get my photography side hustle off the ground. My initial assumption was simple: people are always looking for photographers, so if I start with very affordable rates, clients will follow. I did all the necessary setup and busywork early on: insurance, a new camera, PPA membership, and the other basics that make things feel official. What I didn’t expect was how difficult it would be to land paid clients. I’ve done a few TFP shoots, which were useful for practice and portfolio building, but so far I haven’t earned a single dollar from photography. ...

As I build my photography side hustle while working full-time as a software engineer, I keep returning to one idea: minimalism. Both fields pull me in different directions. Programming has taught me to strip things down to their essentials. Photography constantly tempts me with more gear, more tools, more stuff. Balancing the two has made me think deeply about what minimalism really means in creative work. The Simplicity of Code In programming, I live in a world of virtual tools. A laptop, an editor, a few accounts, and I can build almost anything. Over the years, these tools have faded into the background. GitHub, IDEs, frameworks, and cloud platforms all exist, but they feel weightless. They live on the screen, not in my bag. ...

Generative AI has made my job as a software engineer much easier, but it’s also a bit scary. The question everyone is asking is whether AI will replace my job. The next question is, what can I do to secure my future? What are the skills that are hard for AI? For years, I have enjoyed photography, and I hope to turn it into a business when I retire to stay busy. It does seem that generative AI will eliminate the need for a lot of photography as well. Businesses could create ads from quick snapshots of their products, and people could generate professional photos from their family snapshots, etc. ...

Ever since I bought iPad, I have tried to make it my main computing device. I love the form factor. I love many apps on it. I have really started to enjoy many photography apps on it. Touch screen makes a lot of sense for photo editing. Snapseed, Apple Photos, Affinity Photo are my favorite photo apps on the iPad. But it has been hard to incorporate it in my photography workflow. So my current workflow looks like this: ...

Update: Here is my current workflow. Now that I have a 10.5" iPad Pro, I am trying real hard to use it as a productive machine, possibly as a main machine. Unfortunately, it has been a challenge. I almost want to return it but I really love the form factor of iPad. I am hoping that in the next few updates, it will be almost usable as a main machine. For programming, I am in love with mosh shell. Yes this is cheating by doing real work on a VPS but it is actually an enjoyable experience. ...

I signed up on a few microstock sites hoping to recoup some of the cost of my camera. These sites provide FTP access for easy uploading photos. Lightroom doesn’t come with an easy way to publish or export photos to FTP site. But Lightroom SDK comes with a free sample plugin that can export photos to an FTP site. It works really well and is very easy to install. I learned this at LightroomSolutions.com. ...

Now that I have a new fancy camera, I have tried to organize my photos better. Over the years I have collected about 70GB of photos. It seems a lot to me but apparently there are many people with well over 1000 GB of photos. The biggest challenge with so many photos is that it is hard to organize them. Upon several recommendations and some searches on the web, it seems Lightroom is the best software for organizing and managing photos. ...

A creative photography project exploring themes of reading, thoughts, and nature.