Architecture and Airbnb photography.

For those maybe wondering—and more importantly, for, ahem, me to drum up my side-gig—I do architectural photography. But majority of my recent shoots were “work-for-hire” meaning I was just the guy on-site with the camera shooting for firms so I could claim no rights to the photos I take. I could not, say, post them on my Facebook page. Still, I can provide links to the firms’ finished products if I want to (which I do on my website).

To briefly recap how I got started, back in 2009 I got into the hobby of shooting architecture in NYC and Hudson Valley and posting my photos online for comment-and-critique on photography discussion forums when an architect found a project of his in one of my posted photos. His firm contacted me, scheduled my first shoot on “trial”, and I have since been retained. Now, I’d say I’m the firm’s de facto photographer and friends with the architect.

Other professionals in various industries have since found me (I now shoot food, too), and although the phone was far from constantly ringing-off-the-hook, there were times when it did and my hobby started supporting itself.

In my mind I’m doing this (and, in case you noticed, my YouTube videos) with an eye for the future. So that when Vi and I retire this could perhaps help fund our travels together. I tell myself, keep finding new things to learn and do, busy myself with producing for a wide audience, and embrace what platform or technology the new generation comes up with, as I’m sure there will always be a market for old-and-graying former professionals still working the field.

There are plenty of big photography companies out there funded in the millions by venture capitalists that will guarantee professional results every time but will not save you money or deliver the more-than-enough amount of photos or person-to-person quality of service. Then, there’s me. I’ve nothing against big industry—my time spent with them has always been lucrative and very enjoyable—but I’d still say support local and let’s hope it all works out.

Photographing the heavens in my neck of the woods.

I have turned into a kind of nocturnal photographer, heading out on clear and moonless nights to parts far from the town and city lights, revisiting old places I’ve been to and scouting for new ones from which to take photos of the Milky Way. It has become my all-consuming pastime of late constantly monitoring the weather, studying maps, and getting up in the middle of the night driven by the desire to create art from what little light trickles down from the dark heavens above, by seeing the Milky Way appearing like magic on my camera’s LCD screen when there is nothing there for my naked eyes to see other than a smattering of stars, and by the sheer enormity of the Universe that is intriguingly dark and engulfing to my sense of place in reality. While my day is typically flooded with superficialities and domesticities, at night alone in nature the black void surrounding me elevates my senses to hyperawareness and raises my consciousness into being. Maybe it’s just evolutionary instinct kicking in, imagining unseen predators lurking in the shadows, or maybe it’s the clumsy fumbling in the dark trying to operate machinery without error or maybe both. Or maybe, if quantum mechanics is to be believed, it’s the realization that I\’ve come full circle while standing there in awe of a Universe whose vastness my mind cannot comprehend and that is something my mind helps create. With quantum mechanics, the proposition, \”I think therefore I am\”, becomes true only to a point because the “I” is not just the “am” anymore but is also creator–or co-creator among the multitude other I’s–of the Universe in which the “I” does its thinking.