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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My first visit to Vietnam was with my father 11 years ago. It was his first time returning to the country since war drove him and my mother away from their own home.

I was shocked at the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) because it was extremely crowded with motorbikes and cars with no real sense of order including lack of traffic lights and crosswalks. You wouldn’t be able to cross the street if you don’t trust the drivers on the road nor have the confidence to get to the other side of the street, slowly moving forward and never backwards through cross traffic. I was frozen with fear of getting hit, but eventually learned to cross the street.

The craziness that is the streets of HCMC (from 2007):

If you look closely, you can see a man carrying tires on his motorbike wave at the camera.

Three years ago, it was my second visit to Vietnam, but that time, with my mother. I will always remember the time I saw a little girl crossing the street as it will remain etched in my memory forever. Seeing that she was about to do such an impressive feat which to her
was probably routine, I got my camera ready:

I then realized that she was headed for me and our taxi, her eyes asking for money with her open palm. That’s when I saw me.

I’ve always wondered what my life would be like if my parents had never made it to the US. What if I had been born in Vietnam and grew up there instead? What if I had different parents? What kind of things would I not have the privilege of seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, or
doing? How much of my life would be similar to this little girl? They say that favorable social circumstances has more to do with your opportunities and future and I believe that notion more and more. They also say that you don’t know what you’re missing until it’s gone so maybe for the little girl, that was just life as she knew it.

I wanted to give the little girl some money, but I was taken aback by what had happened that by the time I had a chance to absorb it all to react, the taxi driver had whisked us away.

I think about the girl and wonder where she is now. The optimistic side of me wants to believe she’s on the way to do great things.

This year, I am spending my birthday in Vietnam. And no doubt I’ll get a new perspective on life and myself (one of the reasons why I love to travel the world). Vietnam, I’m looking forward to what you have to show and teach me.

When I was younger and skeptical about my dad’s suggestions, he would always say to me Trust me.

The year was 1999. It was the first time I had traveled internationally that I could remember (I had traveled once before, but I was too young to recall). This time, my family was on a crazy 9 city in 18 days tour of China and had already gone through Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Xian.

We were in Guilin and on a boat. A river cruise along the Li River to be exact.

The Li River is well-known to have beautiful scenery. Endless beautiful tall mountains and peaceful waters everywhere that typically grace chinese brush paintings. I took pictures to capture this art in real life. It was so beautiful that I kept on taking pictures.

By the end of the boat ride which was a few hours long, my dad turned to me and scolded, You just wasted a whole roll of film taking pictures of the scenery. He even added that I wasted money, too. This was the film days of 12, 24, or 36 exposures per roll which were a few dollars and then also having to pay for the developing to actually see the pictures.

He continued to argue his case that day: pictures with people are better and because it shows that you were there, too.

When I started to learn more about photography and shoot more seriously, my primary focus was landscapes and still life (mainly food). People photos weren’t my thing I would tell myself and occasionally others. And it’s probably this very river cruise that sparked my beginnings in landscape photography. I suppose I felt that photos of landscapes and still life were more universal.

It turns out I took 19 scenic photos on that cruise and here’s a photograph of the prints:

This is a scan of my favorite one and I’m actually pleasantly surprised that I was able to find one that is decent considering I had no idea what I was doing back then (note that embedding the date onto the picture was all the rage.)

In more recent years, I’ve started to realize that my father was right and that photographs with people are interesting. The emotional eyes, facial expressions, and body language just add so much more to the story captured in the photograph. Add in background and lighting and you’ve got an anthology.

Over a decade later, I can’t help but wonder how much I would have changed artistically had I followed more of my father’s photography advice.

Having been to many weddings over the last few years and taking photos with my digital SLR camera, I’m starting to realize it now.

When I was younger, my aunt and uncle had art hanging on their walls at their house and one of them was of fruit. I can only remember pears.

It was still life, but delicious still life. I never really thought much of it until recently.

Before leaving on my November international trip, I was excited to find a package FedEx’d to me. An advanced signed copy of the new South Beach Wine & Food Festival Cookbook (to be released on November 16) and two complimentary tickets to the 2011 Food Festival’s Grand Tasting Village this coming February in Miami Beach, Florida. I can’t wait!

I had won the cookbook and tickets from a Foodspotting photography contest. I had signed up for the site when it was in beta and the contest encouraged me to finally try the site out which involved finding and submitting 3 photos that represented each category chapter from the South Beach Wine & Food Festival Cookbook. As I went through my photo collection for 21 photos, I wished I had cataloged them better. What I found is that I don’t eat BBQ and comfort food out at restaurants much. Unfortunately, this contest wasn’t about how good the photos were artistically, but about speed, but I’ll take it. (I almost wasn’t a winner in the contest because of a bug in the foodspotting site which affected the actual results, but I was able to work it out with foodspotting to clear things up.)

I started taking digital color photos of food shortly after I took a black & white film darkroom photography course back in 2002. At the time, no one else was taking photos of food during meals since journaling and sharing such photos on social networks weren’t a big thing yet. My reason for taking them were to practice the photography concepts I had learned in the course like composition, framing, and depth of field; food was an easy subject and readily available.

After all these years of taking photos of food, it’s satisfying to know that even though I didn’t have a goal at the time except to simply take photos that I’m able to turn the effort into something more. I’m grateful for my patient friends and family who have supported my effort especially when they were hungry and waited for me to finish taking photos of the food at our table, including this one:

The funny thing is that when I found out I won, the first thought that came to my head was… I get to take more photos of food! Maybe that makes me more of a photographer than a food enthusiast.

Because I would go hungry for a good shot (photography, that is).

Despite my wanderlust tendencies, I do not have a carry-on suitcase of my own.

I used to have a 26″ suitcase until I lost a wheel. Poof! It was gone somewhere between the walk from the Airport Bus stop along Nathan Road in Hong Kong and my cousin’s place.  And the ground started shaving off the plastic casing of my suitcase.  A PAIN to deal with, I promise you.

This wouldn’t have been that big of a deal had I not had multiple destinations to travel after that… like the Beijing Olympics.

So I tried to come up with a contingency plan.  Perhaps I could buy a new suitcase while in Hong Kong or convince one of my friends leaving for Hong Kong days later to bring one for me either from an online store or an actual store.

One day, my mom came back from the market one day with a plastic wheel. What a smart and resourceful idea, I thought.  I had forgotten about seeing, on my last trip, a shop piled high to the ceiling with random items that were waiting to be disassembled into parts:

It would probably have been easier for me to find a replacement part than I thought if places like that were around.  My mom got a plastic wheel instead of a rubber wheel because she forgot that the exchange rate was about 7 to 8:1, so the 35 HKD wheel sounded pricey when it was really just 5 USD than the plastic wheel which was 7 HKD (1 USD).

It was a lot of pressure to find a suitcase and after losing a wheel, I wanted to make sure I got a high quality suitcase (and one with a good warranty). After some searching, I figured the best option was to find one after returning to the US especially since products purchased internationally usually have region specific warranty coverage.

Meanwhile… I had to do something about my gimpy suitcase.  I made it to the Hong Kong airport except the rod holding the wheels in place was not staying put. Packaging tape (next to duct tape) cures all… and the check-in counter staff was glad to provide it.

On my return flight to SF, the Beijing counter did not have packaging tape for my suitcase and instead gave me luggage label paper instead.  You know, the labels they print out and loop around your luggage sticking the label to itself.  My suitcase was looking quite ghetto at that point:

Since the trip of luggage woes, I haven’t been able to find an appropriate replacement.  I’ve been borrowing carry-ons from friends or using an even larger heavy suitcase (Australia, Ireland, Minnesota, San Diego, Orlando, Dallas).  I wanted to buy a Samsonite because I’d rather pay more than to have to go through the trouble of having to deal with a one wheeled suitcase away from home.  Ross is the best place I’ve found to buy suitcases and if you happen to shop with someone who’s 65 years or older, you can get an additional 10% senior discount on Tuesdays. They even carry Samsonites.

If a good sale comes out, however, then all bets are off. I just got the following Samsonite set for $60 from eBags… now I can stop borrowing other people’s carry-ons and start acting like a real traveller!

(Well, after my trip next week since it’s scheduled to arrive while I’m gone.)

It’s a new (lunar) year and although a new year shouldn’t be the only time to set goals, I happened to set a new one yesterday.  

One of the goals I set in 2007 was to visit an international destination at least once a year.  That year, I went to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shunde, Vietnam, Macau and last year, Hong Kong, Macau, Shunde, Beijing.  Had it not been for the Olympics last year, there wouldn’t have been such an overlap.  Before that, I set a goal to see and photograph the Seven Natural Wonders of the World (though there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on an official list).

Inspired during a recent conversation, my new goal will shake things up a bit yet still fits in with the previous goal:

Seven Continents in Seven Years.

At first this sounds like a daunting goal, but as I thought about it, I might be able to reach my goal in 4-5 years especially with my home continent already checked off and a rough potential plan:

2008 — North America, Asia
2009 — Europe, Australia
2010 — South America
2011+ — Africa, Antartica

My friends and I have been talking about going to Machu Picchu, Peru and I’ve always wanted to see the Egypt and Zimbabwe is on the Seven Natural Wonders list for Victoria Falls.  And last year, visiting Antartica was a topic of discussion… it will be a little more tricky and likely more costly, though.

Now this isn’t about quantity and simply checking off the continents.  With my wanderlust tendencies, I’m also going to try to limit the use of tour operators to only portions of the trips, if I must.  This is about experiencing different parts of the world and wandering off the beaten path… the journey and not the destination.  Now with a concrete plan.  

When I started this travel site, I found a quote that captured what should be the essence of travel and this site: 

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”

Bill Bryson, The Best American Travel Writing 2000

So I now have 6 years to experience everyday firsts in 5 of 7 continents.  I can’t wait for the journey ahead!

My lifetime progress is 3 of 7 with 15 countries (6%):

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