One Year and A Hundred Posts!

I started this blog a little less than a year ago and today I'm posting my hundredth post.  I can't believe this blog has survived that long.  My attention span for these things is usually about a week so I'm happy to be here doing this a year later.  I started this blog to learn how to use my Nikon d7000, and to help create a memory of the things Sara and I do, but it's turned into a lot more than that.  Over the past year I've learned how to use my camera and I've learned a little HTML and a little CSS, I've learned some things about photo editing, I've started a photo blog for my school, and I've been all over the world taking pictures.  It's been awesome.  But the best thing this blog has given me is a better appreciation for Korea.  I spend time now thinking about where to go and what to see, thinking about what I like about Korea, and through photography trying to take a place I don't always think of as beautiful and interesting and find in it the beautiful and interesting.  It's been an awesome year and I hope the next one is just as amazing.  For this post, I'm going to post 10 of my favorite pictures from the last year and links to the corresponding blog posts.  I can't believe I've posted a thousand pictures.  Thanks to everybody who reads this blog and everybody who supports me by checking in.  As always, here's 10 pictures and some foolish comments.

One of the First

From my very first post.  Sara and I at the Pohang fireworks festival, which is coming up again next week.  I had no idea how to use my camera at this point and was just kind of guessing at what to do.  I'm excited to go back and do it again this year with at least a little bit more knowledge of what all the buttons do on my camera.

Homigot

The reason I started the blog was to take pictures of places like Homigot.  Korea's got all this cool crap that doesn't make it into the glossy picture pages of the Lonely Planet, and I wanted to put some of it out there for people to see.

NYC Cafe

My first restaurant post!  Sadly I think NYC Cafe is now closed.  I will miss that buffalo chicken sandwich.

Chilpo Jazz Festival

I bought an expensive flash and I was firing that thing everywhere.  This guy was at the Chilpo jazz festival selling kebabs and smoking his hookah.  He was cool enough to sit through about ten shots until I got this one.

I-Dong

Looking back at this post, I don't love the photos, but I think it was the first time I started thinking about photography as being somehow an extension of my vision of the world.  I started to slow down a little bit and think about what I was doing with the camera.  It doesn't always turn out the way I want, but I started to think about photography less as a way to collect memories and more as a way to create something new with a camera and a computer.

Flying

These are still some of my favorite shots, and the whole experience was just another reason why this blog has been so great.  Instead of sitting at home eating pizza and watching TV, we hiked up into the hills behind our house to watch the sunset and take pictures.  Not something we'd have done without my desire to populate this blog with pictures.

Seoul

No post of mine has been nearly as popular as the one I did about Seoul.  I don't really like the pictures, but when people search for Korea, they want to know about Seoul.  Most of my posts have fifty to one hundred page views, this one has almost one thousand.

El Escorial

This is another picture that's more about the experience than the picture.  My wife and my mother-in-law and I drove up to this hill to take pictures of this monastery in Spain.  But I didn't have a lens with anywhere near enough zoom and every picture ended up with a tiny dot in the background.  This was as good as I could get.  It was nearly a wasted drive, but I'll never forget how funny my mother-in-law thought the whole thing was.  

Buseoksa Temple

After we got our car, the blog became something bigger than Pohang.  It became more about Korea, which I'm really happy about.  I like living in Pohang, but the last couple months of owning our car and getting out into the rest of the country have just been awesome.  We've got a five day weekend coming up and we plan on getting to as many places as we can.  

Yellow Flowers in Gyeongju

This was my first real attempt at engagement style photos.  I really like most of them, though I learned that my wife is very photogenic and I am.... not.



This last year has been an amazing adventure.  Thanks again to everybody out there who looks at my pictures and reads what I have to say.  I really appreciate all the feedback and support I get.  Can I get another 100 posts in the next year?  I hope so.