Photography & the eye

Some things I'd rather show than say. I keep the kit deliberately small — one camera, a single 23mm prime, natural light fixed in the grade afterward — and shoot the people and the cities I'm living in, a month or two at a time. It looks like a hobby. It's actually one long project: I spent years training a single eye, attacking color from six different angles at once, until photography, video, design, and the way I dress all started obeying the same handful of rules.

And there's a quieter layer underneath the shareable stuff — painting, model kits, the occasional cosplay — things I make like no one will ever see them, for the doing and nothing else. I'll show you the gallery half honestly and keep the private half private, because that's the deal I made with it.

The whole thing is one eye

People treat "the artistic side" as a pile of separate hobbies. For me it's one project with one through-line, and the through-line is color theory — not as a topic you cram, but as a sense you grow.

“The color wheel — its importance, but also how hard it is to learn and understand. It's not something you can study for 2 hours and get a sense for; you just have to train your eye over a long time. For me, engaging with colors from many different fields was really useful — painting, photography, color grading, graphic design, fashion, interior design.”— from my UX notes

That's the actual reason I picked up so many visual crafts. Not because I couldn't decide on one — because each one teaches your eye the same thing from a different door. Painting teaches you value before color. Grading teaches you what a color cast does to a mood. Fashion teaches you that two things can both be "nice" and still fight each other. Stack enough of those doors and they collapse into a single instinct.

And here's the part that matters more than any of it looking pretty: that instinct pays rent in the work I actually care about. The eye is upstream of the Maker — it's why my apps don't look like a backend engineer made them, which is what I am.

“Making videos and learning color theory to paint improved my UI/UX design skills for apps. Everything is connected. Minmax that shit, and don't forget to have fun along the way.”— from my life-goals note

So when you see a clean app screen from me, that's not a frontend skill I have. It's the same eye that picked the grade on a portrait, pointed at a different surface.

If I had to compress the whole eye into a single law, it'd be this: a good image has one thing your attention lands on, and everything else is in service of getting you there. I wrote it down once while figuring out my first app's design, and the funny thing is the sentence doesn't even mention apps:

“You want one single clear thing that immediately draws your attention. This is also the case with good photography, or good graphic design, and really, zooming out, all design.”— from my UX notes

That law is why I shoot the way I do, why my thumbnails put one emotion front and center, and why a screen with three competing call-to-action buttons makes me itch. It's also why I love negative space — the eye needs somewhere to rest before it can be pulled. Once you've internalized "one focal point, plus room to breathe," you stop seeing photography, design, and a good outfit as different problems. They're the same problem with different materials.

The kit is deliberately small

I have a real anti-gear streak, and it's not aesthetic minimalism for the photo — it's that gear is a way to feel productive without making anything. So I keep a written "DO NOT NEED" list and I actively sell things I own but don't use.

• One body, one fast 23mm prime, a mini-tripod, and a Shure MV7 mic — that's the whole talking-head / street / portrait rig.
• The 23mm is a face decision, not a focal-length preference: a more natural field of view, the most flattering for a portrait. I sold the 56mm because the 23 covered it.
• On the kill-list: a Tamron 17-70mm (“wayyy too big… I literally never do street photography that needs zoom”), an 11mm (“way too much fisheye”), a travel tripod, a Gorilla pod, light stands, a wireless mic I'd never used.
• The second rig is just a phone and a gimbal — a co-equal half of the system for vlogging and travel B-roll, not an afterthought.

The one thing I will not skimp on is audio: audio quality is absolute king. I'll relight a face in post all day, but a bad mic ruins everything and can't be fixed. The MV7 is the only non-negotiable in the bag.

I'm also deeply suspicious of the gimbal, philosophically:

“Natural lighting honestly beats staged lighting 9 out of 10 times… and a natural shake is honestly a pro in most cases when a phone shot is being used to capture a natural, real moment. This [gimbal] fights that.”— from my camera-setup note

That's the taste underneath the gear list: I'd rather have a real moment with a little imperfection than a technically perfect shot of nothing. So I shoot in good window light, let the handheld breathe a little, and fix the color later — never the soul of the frame.

Shooting myself, and the cities I'm in

Most of what I shoot is portraits, fits, and the places I'm living — I've been nomadic for a stretch of years, so the body of work is genuinely "this city, this month, this version of me." And I keep it disciplined: I work off an actual shot list, structured by location plus outfit plus intent, with little checkboxes I tick off as I execute them.

A few of my own rules from that list, because they show the intent better than I could describe it. For the inspirational landscape shot — me looking out at the sky — I wrote down an exact ratio: I should be less than 1/16th of the photo. For a fashion set in a park: multiple fits, cycle shirts first then pants, similar poses, for the gallery. When I was in Japan I wasn't after snapshots; I wanted photos that look clearly like I'm in Japan — portraits with more story and some character to them: a yukata at a shrine, castle redos, self-portraits everywhere.

There's an honest, slightly self-conscious thread in here too, which I'd rather just admit. A recurring item in my daily notes, before a shoot, is literally "practice slight smiling before photoshoot." I rehearse my own face. I find that funny and a little vulnerable and entirely true, and it's the kind of thing this whole site is for — being a real person instead of a curated one.

Some of these shoots also quietly double as infrastructure. A "sleep" tile for a course, a body cut-out PNG for compositing later, a fit-gallery set for a profile — photography in service of the things I'm building, not separate from them. Talent shown, not stated: I'd rather you scroll a gallery than read me call it good. So here's the gallery — all shot on the one body and prime, graded by hand:

Color grading is where the eye gets technical

Photography is the shareable face of the domain, but color grading is where I went deep, and it's the clearest place my eye turned into actual craft rather than vibes. I grade in DaVinci, and I run a fixed node tree I reuse so a change ripples back across a whole edit retroactively.

• A repeatable 7-node pipeline: white balance → contrast → log → color contrast → sharpness → skin → vignette.
• White-balance off a white t-shirt; push the lift toward blue/teal and the gamma toward orange by hand for the teal-orange look — not a one-click LUT.
• A real skin-tone qualifier recipe, with skin isolated on parallel nodes so I can grade a face and its background completely independently.
• Film-stock emulation down to a named stock (Kodak 2823), film grain, a smooth curve for filmy contrast, and a mild half-pixel gaussian softening on the whole output.
• To match a look exactly, I'll grab a still from the actual show I'm referencing and match luma, saturation, and temperature against a gray-127 reference clip.

The way I learned it is very me: I don't study grading in the abstract, I find the best reference I can and reverse-engineer it. My north star is a grade I cloned myself — the best color grade to copy from is the Dami Lee Dune video copy I made. Find the thing that already works, take it apart, understand why, rebuild it. (It's the same move as everywhere else in my life; the domains change, the method doesn't.)

And I'll be honest about the frugal streak that runs through all of this: my grading notes contain a cheerful little "TODO: get pirated DaVinci and Dehancer." I buy paints by exact catalog number to save money and I pirate my color tools. Frugal but meticulous, all the way down.

The video is a song

Editing, for me, isn't about cuts — it's about rhythm. This is probably my strongest single aesthetic conviction in the whole visual stack:

“Music is King. The entire video is like a song — it should have good rhythm above all. The delivery, the music, the sound effects are all part of a performance.”— from my editing guide

So when I edit I'm scoring, not assembling. Good exposure and light on the day should do ninety percent of the lifting; jump cuts want a natural pause, not an instant snap; only the hook needs to be extra. I think about the Kuleshov effect by name — two shots next to each other create a meaning neither has alone — and I treat a viewer's attention as something you sustain psychologically across the whole runtime, not grab once.

That said, here's a flaw I keep on file about myself, because I'd rather name it than have you notice it: I over-use transitions and sound effects when I'm not careful, and my thumbnails come out undersaturated next to the people I benchmark against. I keep a running feedback note of exactly these failure modes. I'm fine telling you the thing isn't perfect yet — the self-awareness is the point, not the polish.

Type, design, and knowing my ceiling

Typography is where I'm openly opinionated. I keep use-case-segmented font lists — one set for reading, one for UI, one for subtitles, one for text animation — and I have actual favorites with reasons: Futura ("timeless, popularly used by big logos"), American Typewriter ("a good immersive vibe"), Forever Freedom for vertical content. Subtitles get a spec, not a guess: a few words on screen at a time, a mild three-frame pop, write-on timing matched to the words.

But this is also the part of the domain where I bump into my own ceiling and like it. Thumbnails are roughly a fifth of my total editing time, because that's where the click lives — and I'm honest that they may simply not be my strongest skill:

“May even hire a separate person experienced in Photoshop just for the thumbnails if it's not a match for your skills.”— a note to myself

That's the growth-mindset framing I try to keep everywhere: get good enough to know what good looks like, then be willing to hand the last ten percent to someone better. I'd rather a great result than my own fingerprints on a mediocre one.

The whole design half loops straight back into building. When I made my first app, the lesson that stuck was that fonts interact with colors — my app looked bad until the right typeface met the right pastel background — and that hierarchy is just a stack of levers: size, weight, shadow, color, grouping things into "islands." I even spend time critiquing strangers' app designs on r/TestMyApp, because reps on other people's work train the eye faster than waiting for my own.

Fashion, honestly (I got roasted)

Style is the most public-facing piece, and the one with the best wins-and-flukes story, so I'll lead with the fluke. I turned around 25, decided my wardrobe still looked like college, and hired an actual stylist — then turned the whole thing into a blind game show where judges rated my self-styled outfits against hers. Mine got demolished.

“I did a rookie mistake — threw on every accessory I owned.”— from the stylist video

I wore the gold chain she'd explicitly told me not to. I copied a fit straight off a store mannequin, wrong move. One of my outfits earned a flat zero with the review "perfect for a first date when you don't want a second." Her clean monochrome looks scored nines and tens. I deserved it.

What I took from getting beaten is exactly the one-eye thesis from the top of this page, applied to clothes — and I said it on camera before I'd connected it to the rest:

“I don't want to be flashy. Most of my clothing never has logos… European summer, clean, intentional.”— from the stylist video

The principles turned out to be the same ones: color harmony (similar saturation so pieces don't compete), balance ("your eye needs negative space — neutral, basic pieces to let your eyes rest"), and intentional fit. That's photography and painting wearing a jacket. The function-first discipline carries over too — my shoes are sorted by job, and a daily shoe has to be waterproof, lightweight, grippy, and plain black or plain white so it works with every outfit, the exact same anti-bloat logic as my camera bag. And the closing reframe is the most-me sentence in the whole project: fashion isn't vanity, it's self-awareness — our outfits broadcast messages before we even speak. I'm a psychology nerd; of course I'd end up here.

The private half — paint like no one will see it

This is the part I keep quiet, and I want to be careful even mentioning it, because the whole point is that it has no audience. I paint (digitally, fundamentals-first), I sketch manga-style, I build model kits, I've got cosplay plans. None of it is for show. The governing rule is one I wrote for myself and try hard to obey:

“If painting, for example — paint like no one will ever see the painting, like I have no benefit from it other than painting.”— from my monthly-goals note

I'll tell you a little, in that spirit, and no more. The painting is shape-and-value first; my honest self-diagnosis is that shape is the biggest factor that makes something look nice, and the key drawing skill I'm missing — so I work in big simple strokes, black and white before color. (And here's a true contradiction I'll own: in the same breath as "paint for no reason," I catch my brain noting it's "super practical for web design." The aspiration is purity; the instinct keeps reaching for use. That tension is just honestly who I am.)

The model-building is the most equipped of the private crafts — I went deep without ever meaning to show anyone. The kit is the RX-93 Hi-Nu, Real Grade (not High Grade — that's a correction I care about getting right), and I bought a full tool and paint setup deliberately in Osaka: God Hand nippers, panel-line liner, scribe tools, primer, drybrush, metallic finishing. The paints are Vallejo Model Color, chosen by exact SKU specifically because they're non-flammable for air travel — and chosen as a near-primary palette, which is, embarrassingly, a color-theorist's way to buy model paint. Cosplay is still all planning: a Bruno Mars fit that doubles as wearable clothes, an Eraserhead look, candidates filtered by what suits my actual face, hair, and build, and what's packable. These are decompression, full stop. Hands busy, brain quiet, nobody watching. I'm including them here only so you know they exist; please don't read them as a flex, because to me they're the opposite.

What I've done, and the thread I'd hand you

If you see your own eye in any of this — or you just want to argue about teal-orange, or one focal point, or whether a gimbal kills the moment — say hi. The best things I make tend to start as a conversation, and this side of me has gone way too long without one.