Lines, light, and small changes.
I tend to like photos where something ordinary shifts a little: a road becomes a light trail, or a tree turns into texture and lines.
Photography
Photos I
kept.
Two Gold Keys and three Honorable Mentions, cultural field notes from Chinatown, and a tighter edit organized around place, structure, and light.
Wait longer than feels natural.
Long exposure taught me to wait. Sometimes the better frame appears after the first obvious shot is already gone.
A reason to keep editing.
Scholastic recognition matters to me, but I also care about which images I still want to keep weeks later.
Chinatown Cultural Exploration · 2026
A camera can also be a way of listening.
After five seminars on Chinese American history, immigration, identity, and Chinatown communities, I spent two days in San Francisco Chinatown documenting storefronts, workers, cultural spaces, and everyday community life through photography and field notes.
Field edit · San Francisco, 2026
Four frames from the visit.
Chosen from the larger set because each frame shows a different part of the neighborhood: music, street life, visual identity, and daily work.
Built form · La Jolla, Shanxi
How places hold a line.
Concrete, timber, water, and streets. These frames stayed because the structure of the place was already doing most of the composition.
Land & light · Yosemite, California
Distance changes the frame.
Wide views made for slower photographs: looking for where the ridge, shadow, or open sky begins to organize itself.
Close observations · California
Color, pattern, and texture.
Closer frames, where a flower, a weathered seed pattern, or three small birds are enough to carry the image.
