Today, I turn 26 years old! I have now completed a full quarter-century, which is kind of crazy, but it’s also exciting to see how much more life I still have left to live. I like to celebrate each birthday by saying I survived another year not out of morbid humor, but because I really do strive to live adventurously as much as possible, so whether it’s been rappelling down the tallest building in Waikiki, standing on a cliff ledge next to an active lava flow, or simply getting into cars and planes to see new places and visit old friends, as long as I come out of it all alive, the adventure continues!  I can only hope that 26 is even more epic than 25 was, because despite my minor quarter-life crisis moments, 25 was a year of important change and growth for me.

My birthday photos were taken by my good friend and fellow photographer, Jonas Maon. The top jumping image was composited by me with one of my recent starry sky photographs, and this collaboration is available as a print!

And the rest of the year! (Catch up on the first half here.)

July

Jason Mraz concert as an early wedding anniversary celebration!

Americana 2012 photo shoot to celebrate relaunch of this very blog!

Continue reading “2012 Year In Review Part 2” »

Happy New Year from us <3 ;)

2012 was a crazy year of change, adventures, meeting amazing people, and a LOT of photos! Here is Part One (January – June) of 2012…to be continued tomorrow!

January

New Year’s Day Sunrise

Continue reading “2012 Year In Review Part 1” »

Edward and I, one summer night. Print available.

Three years ago today, I met the love of my life. We celebrate two anniversaries – our wedding, of course, and the night we met completely by chance, and everything changed.  Here are our two versions of the story of that night that we each wrote a couple of years ago, when the memories were still crystal clear, so we would never forget:

The short version, as told by Dallas:

Well, it all started when I went to the TBQ party. I noticed him as he came in because 1.) I thought he was hot, 2.) He had a camera, and 3.)I’d never seen him before, even though I know a lot of the Twitter-photographers.  Later, when we were shooting the opening dance/music for the night, I noticed I had a better position for photos than he did, so I made eye contact with him for the first time and motioned for him to move closer as I scooted over. Later, I went to hide by Kaeo, who was doing the A/V stuff for the event’s livestream, and Ed ended up following me back there. We talked about photography, and he showed me his photos on his iPhone. I remember thinking, “Do I really have to look at this guy’s photos?” but then I also realized I’d just been complaining about no one seeing my own photos, and this was obviously one way to go about it. Plus, his weren’t bad.  Before we stopped talking, I added him to Facebook and we exchanged cards.

Later that night, he found me again, and literally dragged me onto the dance floor. Anyone who was there that night might remember my infamous ‘hooker-boots’, and my feet were already dying…but I danced anyway. Considering I can barely walk in them, I thought I did okay, but he now believes I can’t really dance. 

Back with my friends, I was giggling madly about the whole thing. I don’t do the “meet-random-people-dance-with-them” thing…EVER.

He eventually came back and dragged me out for another dance, after which I pleaded mercy for my feet and we spent the rest of the night at the club just sitting and talking.

After the party was over, a lot of people were re-locating to Shokudo for food, and Ed offered to give me a ride there. I was a little hesitant getting into a car with a stranger, but I figured if he tried anything bad I could blacklist him on Twitter (yes, my logic…), so I went with him. We drove to Shokudo and sat in his car for 20 minutes still talking with each other before heading into the restaurant. He bought me dinner and we talked and talked and talked…

Finally, he admitted he had to be up for work in just a few hours, so I walked him out to his car, because I was catching a ride home with Kaeo. We slowly said goodnight, and then he lingered by his car door. I’m kind of blunt and impatient, so I finally asked him point blank, “So, do you want to kiss me?”

He said yes. And I said, “Okay.” And he did. Twice.

And that’s the story of how we met.

Pretty much love-at-first-sight. <3

Continue reading “One December Night” »

Photo by Ross D. Hamamura

This week’s adventure featured me getting the opportunity to rappel down the Sheraton Waikiki’s 31 stories to promote Special Olympics Hawaii’s Over the Edge fundraiser event. Individuals who successfully fundraise a minimum of $1000 for the Special Olympics’ athletes get to partake in this annual activity – it’s great fun and a great cause! Over 100 people were registered for the main Saturday event, and if you’d like to see how you can get more information at their website.

I showed up early in order to capture my friend Toby Tamaye of ATMarketing go down first, and he did it like a pro – even with a little aerial Gangnam Style dancing thrown in! Later, it was time for me to head to the top, take some photos of the view, hand off my DSLR, turn on the GoPro, and head down myself. Enjoy!

Continue reading “Over the Edge with Special Olympics Hawaii” »

For this Throwback Thursday, I’m sharing a set of images I made of my dad, uncles, and aunt back in 2009, showing them as children, and again adults, in front of the old family home. For the life of me I can’t find the higher-resolution scan of the old photo, and the original is in storage, or I would have made it bigger, but you get the idea. There’s about 50 years between the original photo and my 2009 re-creation of it – not often you get to do that!

In my searches throughout my hard drives for the original scan of the old image, I’ve come to realize how I really will need to take a month off when I get a new storage system going, and I’m going to tag  everything.

Midway Atoll is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, but there is also a darker side to the beauty, where one is faced with a stark reality of how humans have affected the Earth.

A friend just messaged me on Facebook asking what I thought about Chris Jordan’s MIDWAY Film, knowing I had just been there a couple of months ago for the Battle of Midway 70th anniversary.  Apparently, the legitimacy of the horrific images of dead birds filled with bits of plastic has been called into question by some, but from my personal experience, there is a real issue with the plastics and the birds. Here are two images from my Midway trip that I hadn’t posted before.

First, here is a 100% size crop of some ground on Midway’s Eastern Island. You can see there are bits of plastic everywhere. Also, to the center-right of the photo, there are long, thin, white sticks – those are actually bones of dead birds, which could be seen everywhere on the island. Yes, of course some of them die from other causes, but it is a grim realization that each little pile of plastic represents where a bird once died.

This is the only image I found in my files specifically of a dead bird, and while it isn’t as stuffed with plastic trash as some of the images in Chris Jordan’s preview video, you can still see it died with plastic inside of it:

Continue reading “The Darker Side Of Midway” »

After a week that included three sunrise photo shoots, two hikes, a fashion event, several meetings, and a casual but sweet birthday celebration for my husband, it was nice to take this rainy Monday off to work on cleaning our apartment and catching up on emails. My current top stressor is the death of one of my external hard drives – while I’m fairly certain it was the least critical hard drive to fail, as it contained mostly backups, any data loss is a real punch in the gut for me, and I’m hoping at least some of it can be salvaged. It’s not good that it takes a mini-crisis to make me reflect on my data storage process. I keep all my final images in online storage, but not the RAWs. Hopefully there’s a Drobo in my future soon!

Besides that, one of the main things on my mind has been art. Yes, photography is an art, and I consider some of what I do to be fine art photography. However, my background was in drawing and painting, and I spent my college years studying those arts in equal, if not greater, amounts to photography.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be an illustrator.

This was my art supply collection during the Spring 2007 semester at UH Manoa. Oil painting was my passion, and many of my brushes and paints had been brought home from Italy. I also had developed the habit of buying new art supplies whenever I was feeling down, which, admittedly, had been a lot back then. Art supplies had always represented possibility for me, even if my ideas for using them never came to fruition. I loved to experiment with new mediums, and I always found myself browsing the internet for inspiration from a variety of artists.  Growing up during Japanese anime’s popularity boom in the United States from 1999 on, I had initially gotten into the visual arts after spending a summer drawing Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z fan art. This led me to getting my first little graphics tablet during high school, where I would teach myself digital drawing and painting at home while learning traditional methods in school.  I would draw comics, design characters, and paint portraits.

Compare the 2007 art supply collection to my 2007 photography supply collection – one DSLR, two 35mm SLRs, two lenses, and loads of film photography supplies. Yes, drawing and painting was still my first love then, but that faded over the years until it found equal footing with photography, and then, after graduation, faded away as I pursued my career as a professional photographer.

Since graduating with my BA in Studio Art (didn’t feel I needed a BFA to get where I wanted to go) in December 2008, I have only finished a grand total of about eighteen drawings or paintings, mostly digital. (I know this from counting uploads in one of my Facebook albums)  Compared to how I used to fill up binders and sketchbooks constantly, this lack of drawing and painting has been bothering me this entire year so far. I want so much to start drawing and painting again, whether digitally or traditionally, but trying to find the time and creative energy between the endless photo shoots and editing marathons has proven very difficult. I finally had enough of the nagging feeling in the back of my brain a couple of weeks ago, and bought myself a couple of brand new sketchbooks. One of my biggest hangups with sketching is that I would always be worried about drawing something that wouldn’t look good in the sketchbook later, which of course led to me not drawing anything at all. No excuses this time – I intend to fill both sketchbooks in the next couple of months.

Hopefully I can write again about the subject with a positive update!

Till then, if any of you are curious, here is a link to what would be my online drawing & painting portfolio, if I had one, which includes work spanning from 2006-2010.

Now, I’m going to go sketch for the rest of the night!

Yes, I just spent too much time on thesaurus.com coming up with a title that didn’t say “Mental Health Break”.

Today was kind of a weird day, after a couple of days where I felt a little off, a little unbalanced.  Maybe I’m supposed to put out that I’m perfect, but I am but a flawed human, and am susceptible to the self-questioning that artists tend to inflict upon themselves. This, combined with my steady quarter-life crisis-ing for this, my 25th year on Earth, can put me in a funk, but luckily, I spent the day with a couple of good friends taking photos that don’t really matter. No pressure, no worries, just whatever caught my eye.

It was also truly rewarding to be wandering around Chinatown without any plan or direction, only to unexpectedly run into various friends and acquaintances and being given welcoming hugs or nods and smiles of recognition. I love knowing so many creative and interesting people! Their positive energy is so uplifting when other people or situations try to bring me down.

Thanks, people. ♥

Continue reading “Psychological Wellness Liberty – Chinatown” »