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a spring blog

First foray into portraiture.

As the Cambodia team started financially preparing for the summer mission trip I am going to be a part of (leaving Monday!) a few months ago, a lot of creative fundraising methods came to life—K basically started a pie and fruit tart shop, BJ cranked out several hundred macarons, the team collectively sold baptism/graduation flowers/fruit/Italian soda…and then there was me. I sat around, basically just hoping that my campus job would financially sustain me, a safe option that I had carefully planned out and calculated, leaving little room for error.

For the past however many years that I have been participating in mission trips and 30 Hour Famines and this and thats, I’ve never really had the need to push myself to earn funds. I am blessed to have parents who are always willing to subsidize and support me, and so although I have faced hefty costs going to wherever caught my heart, I’ve never felt a need to take significant steps of faith in asking others to support me for my trips.

But somewhere in between the grind of schoolwork and getting increasingly excited for Cambodia, it struck me that maybe I should try something different—take a risk and do some fundraising to put myself out there, in a vulnerable situation where my success/failure would be public and would result in embarrassment if things didn’t go so well. One of my greatest ongoing struggles is dealing with the reality that I am incompetent and cannot earn the approval of the world, not while being convicted of the Bible’s proclamation that the love, grace, and mercy I receive on a daily basis is completely undeserved and irrelevant to my performance. Being someone who is used to investing minimal effort and easily yielding favorable results, pushing myself in the area of photography is something I have aggressively refused. I don’t take classes or seminars out of fear of ruining the ubiquitous thought that I am completely self-taught, I chose to ignore the technical rules of photography for years in order to continue projecting the image that everything I do can be attributed to a natural eye—that I can break ISO rules, aperture rules, and shoot with whatever settings I want to and still produce a good photo…ultimately, the art and hobby is, despite my justifications, mostly all about myself and my own glory.

So, the idea: to ask people to donate to my mission trip funds in return for graduation photos. This is something I definitely did not want to do, but in light of several messages and prayer meetings speaking to me about leaning into God and trusting him, and the persisting egging of D, it was something I finally caved into. I decided to toss up a status to the Facebook world the day before graduations started and just mention that I was considering taking photos, and would anyone be interested.

To make a long story short, the response and support I’ve received through this experience has been overwhelming. My friends have been more excited than I have; I’ve been humbled by the number of my peers and younger ones who have been willing to help me by waking up at 7am and walking around campus carrying around obnoxious 42” light reflectors, humbled by those who have been spreading my fundraising efforts through word of mouth and doing a lot more than they need to in order to help me get “customers”, humbled by the people who are actually letting me experiment on them as it’s pretty well known that I don’t like taking pictures of people (secretly because I am really bad at it.), humbled by these people who then financially give me much more than I expect and deserve out of a heart of wanting me to be able to experience God’s will in Cambodia without the pressures of worrying how I am going to pay for it myself, humbled by the encouraging check-ups and text messages I get concerning how things are going, humbled by the flood of advice that D has poured over me in terms of posing and lighting to the extent of even trusting me to borrow his and his father’s beautiful L-series equipment. And in terms of the art itself, I’ve been humbled by how little I truly know about photography, how my self-proclaimed preference for shooting landscapes has really been, all of these years, a defense and excuse for my laziness in learning how to explore beyond what is easy; I am again humbled by how bad my technical knowledge and retention of such knowledge is, and humbled by how I 100% do not deserve the equipment I have…

There’s a lot more to say, per usual, but I’ll stop there. Mostly since I have to wake up early to take photos for another group of people, haha…but I guess at the end of the day, I just want to try and express an ounce of the thankfulness and privilege and blessing I’ve been feeling and have received in the past week, in being able to catch a glimpse of God’s faithfulness and patience with me, an immensely prideful and stubborn sinner, even before the mission trip and training for it begins.

Another long day of photos ahead, and then three long days of training, but again I find myself in a place where I know that I cannot even being to think to complain about how I am tired, or how I am getting sick, or about the overarching craziness that has epitomized graduation week. God is setting me in a place of thanks, and I hope I can continue to dwell in this place and learn to know Him through offering what little I have and hoping He will multiply it and reveal Himself in the process.

* Please pray for our trip! It will last from May 27th (Monday) to June 10th (also Monday) and we need all the spiritual support you can offer us :). Thank you!

00:49

Hurrah: showered and done with my graphic design project! And somehow everything is already packed…so all that’s left to do is to send out a last email, import some photos from the past two days, and go to sleep.

And just a quick shout-out to my big brother—congratulations on your master’s degree! I will never admit this out loud, but since you creep on my Tumblr once in a while and the chances of you seeing this (and I kind of want you to see this, kind of not) is like 5%, I will say it: I am really proud of you, and I look up to you a lot. I’m really blessed to have an older sibling like you. I complain a lot about you being too smart and most days I don’t understand how you think (remember when your friend from Yale came over? You guys were just chatting very colloquially and even then I didn’t understand half the English that was being exchanged), but deep down, I really do love you. I’m glad we all get to go to China and spend some time together before you become a real, working adult (as you say, “contributor to society”).

And Stanford, thank you for treating my brother so well. There have been ups and downs, but today during general commencement, I was really touched by the energy and community and just overall, sheer brightness of everyone in the Stadium. I can’t imagine myself anywhere but Berkeley, but there is no doubt that Palo Alto is a place I love dearly and will miss visiting. Of all the colleges in the nation, you are the one I respect the most. There’s some unattainable quality about you that always strikes me with awe…the people you churn out are not corner-cutters, not second tier in the least. You are not a grade inflator, you don’t have that quintessential ivy background that helped pushed you into acknowledgement; you are hard work and dedication, innovation and cutting-edge in all senses of the word. I don’t admit this often either, but there is a part of me that never wanted, never wants to be a part of your community because it’s something sacred to me and I don’t think I would ever deserve it (nor could I deal with it if it ever happened, haha), but my dad nudged me today and said, “Grad school?”, and all I could think about is what a blessing that would be if it ever came down to it.

And God…you know my thanks. You are the source of all of this. All the blessing I feel, all the goodness in my life. Thank you for leading me thus far, and thank you for that promise of always being there in the future.

Next adventure: China. Laters, friends :)

the fifteenth

Up at 9:30am, decided to skip a graduation in order to figure out Lightroom and get photos up for this evening’s banquet, showered and then ran off to Cafe Durant for lunch with CS, did some more photo editing at DL, trekked off to Wheeler/Greek Theatre for the Integrated Biology graduation, somehow got in even though the names had already been called, took more photos, whisked off to DL to do more photo editing and sorting, somehow managed to get to the banquet on Shattuck at 6pm, finished at 8pm, walked to First Presbyterian, joined the guys’ prayer meeting until 10pm, had a key scare with JL, walked home, and edited more photos, realized ALL MY COMPUTER SCIENCE GRADUATION PHOTOS ARE MISSING»>… …. …, had a minor breakdown, thought I recovered them with a file-finder program but actually didn’t, and am now very sad.

The pictures should be salvageable, having been originally saved on someone else’s laptop for the Sunday night banquet, but we’ll see…at this point, there’s nothing I can do and I don’t want to upload any more photos if they’ll be out of chronological order, and it’s 2am now anyway, so I guess it’s time to retire for the night.

I am really, really exhausted. But tonight’s prayer meeting was pretty timely. I did choose to be here for all the graduations, and I did learn how to use a camera in order to take photos, and I have nothing to complain about—I love being busy as opposed to feeling like nothing has been accomplished in 24 hours. So. Intentionally taking more risks, trying to grow out of my immaturity that is attention-seeking and people-pleasing to find personal satisfaction/acceptance/comfort, and promising to be more bold but a little less outspoken. This never used to be a problem, I think? Or it was very well hidden for all these years. Anyway, there are many things to work both away from and towards.

Night :) tomorrow should be a little less hectic, but…another 9am graduation awaits.

7102 on Flickr.

7102 on Flickr.

Look How Far on Flickr. — I think it’s a bit of a relief to be so behind on my 365 uploads—this way, I have a chance to get some outtakes and unshared shots up onto Flickr in between the long gaps I’ve unintentionally created. This particular photo is from the afternoon following my high school graduation…one of my friends here at Cal was pointing out the other day that it hasn’t even been five months since we graduated from high school; five months of uncertainty about what college would be like and the people I’d find there, five months of preparing myself for the next stage of life, five months which completely threw me down from my seniority-filled pedestal back to the floor, where I have been starting everything anew. In five days, exactly a year ago, I will have solidified and completely turned in my early decision application for college: hopes high, unknowing of the plot twists that would occur during senior year. It’s so strange to think about, and yet I distinctly remember anticipating this moment last year, when I would be settled in and my future home would have been long determined and the decision process would seem all too petty and all too much work and all too long ago. Look how far we’ve come.

Look How Far on Flickr.

—

I think it’s a bit of a relief to be so behind on my 365 uploads—this way, I have a chance to get some outtakes and unshared shots up onto Flickr in between the long gaps I’ve unintentionally created.

This particular photo is from the afternoon following my high school graduation…one of my friends here at Cal was pointing out the other day that it hasn’t even been five months since we graduated from high school; five months of uncertainty about what college would be like and the people I’d find there, five months of preparing myself for the next stage of life, five months which completely threw me down from my seniority-filled pedestal back to the floor, where I have been starting everything anew.

In five days, exactly a year ago, I will have solidified and completely turned in my early decision application for college: hopes high, unknowing of the plot twists that would occur during senior year. It’s so strange to think about, and yet I distinctly remember anticipating this moment last year, when I would be settled in and my future home would have been long determined and the decision process would seem all too petty and all too much work and all too long ago.

Look how far we’ve come.

Waking up from a post-graduation nap. 6/4/11

Waking up from a post-graduation nap. 6/4/11