I am a photographer and traveler based out of Washington, DC, area.

I started traveling extensively when I worked in the consulting field. Often times, I had to travel to a client location periodically during the duration of a project. That provided opportunities to explore the area while I was not working.

In 2003, I bought my first digital camera, a Canon PowerShot S400. This little camera changed the way I see the world and remember the experiences. I had interests in photography when I was younger, but the cost of film and processing was too prohibitive to experiment. That’s no longer the case with the advent of the digital camera. From then on the compact camera traveled with me everywhere I went, and I took thousands of photos. Over the time, I started learning on how to improve the quality of my photos. I taught myself the fundamentals of photography, but I think the more important part was the practice – trial and error to see what worked and didn’t work. I also graduated to more sophisticated equipments as my little S400 at one point died to a mechanical failure. Today I still have a point-and-shoot camera that I keep with me at all times, but I also have a DSLR that allows me to take higher quality photos.

The photos I post are mostly from my travels or events I attended. The travel photos depend on the location I’m visiting; in some cases the emphasis is more on the natural landscape or wildlife, in others it’s more on the culture or historical aspects of the place. I also like to take photos of architecture and food, two elements that you always encounter within the culture, anywhere you go. In any case, my primary objective in taking any of these photos is to capture my experience in an image, as a reminder to myself and as a way to share the experience with others.

As for my traveling experience, most of that up until recently was within the continental United States. I’ve been to almost all 48 states in the continental US, except a handful that I hope one day I would have a chance to visit as well. Recently I started expanding my travel experiences with international travels. Aside from traveling to Indonesia where my parents and extended family live, I’ve gone to several South East Asian countries near Indonesia, did a road trip to visit our neighbor in the north, Canada, and most recently, visited the cities of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and Istanbul in Turkey during layovers while traveling between the US and Indonesia. It’s exciting for me to visit places not only to see the sights, but also to learn about the people and their history and culture. Combine that with photography, and I think it becomes something exciting — it’s fun to be able to tell the story of what I learned and experienced through the lens of my camera.

Over the time, I’d like to capture my experience in both photography and travel through posts in this blog. The blog posts I wrote are generally related to the photos I took, but sometimes they are also about observations I made or unique things I learned about the culture in the places I visited — things that would be easier to convey in written words than in pictures. Each post on a particular place contains some information about the place, my recollection of experience visiting the place, and a photograph I took from the place that I think captures the ‘sense of place’ of the place I visited. My hope is that through this blog I can share what I experienced and learned so others can also enjoy and benefit from it.

Note: All photos featured in this blog site were taken by me, and I reserve all rights to use the photographs. If you like any of the photos and would like to use it for personal use, you can get a larger version of the image from my flickr site (each photo is linked to its corresponding flickr image). If you want to use any of the photos for commercial purposes, please contact me to obtain permission.