This post marks the 10 year anniversary of this photo blog. It also coincides with the publication of Volume 2 of my village series. I’ve started working on Volume 3 already as well as documenting a second village about 2km away from my apartment that is already about 90% abandoned and partially demolished. There are only 60 people left in Shijia village.

After hitting the 10-year milestone, I’ve gone back and reviewed some of my early posts and they are absolute crap. I’ve left them here so I can see my growth, Malcome Gladwell has postulated that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. I think I’m at the halfway point of my 10,000 hours. Transitioning back to analog film photography has been extremely helpful by making me slow down and compose better photographs – for several reasons, the most important being each photo costs about US$1.00 for the film & processing. I develop and scan everything at home to save both time and money. Same day service is wonderful.

Photography has allowed me to focus my creativity on projects that aren’t group-decisions (like my design projects). I can make all of the decisions myself – for better or worse. Sometimes creatives need a side-hustle to offset the soul-crushing disappointments of corporate design-by-committee. This website (and now my books) are my side-hustle.

I began this photo blog a couple of months after Instagram launched in 2010, so they are about the same age. It seemed like a short 10 years. I’ve spent about 3 of those years traveling in China on about 40-50 trips.