travel the world. take pictures.

tj holowaychuk is someone i will like to meet one day. when i discovered him in 2013/4, he was active in the nodejs community and was the creator of the express framework, the koa framework, and a host of javascript modules in use by tons of software developers today.

a few years later, he decided to take a step back from active open source development and started an uptime monitoring startup called apex.

earlier today, a friend reached out to ask what was wrong with my media server. before i could respond, they confirmed it was back up. i noted that i didn’t receive any downtime notification and remarked that this was a case for me to extend my homelab to the cloud - maybe a small digital ocean droplet, and use that to monitor my home network’s reachability from the outside world.

then i remembered apex. i visited the domain and saw that the website was unavailable. this led me to google tj and find a comment from him on hacker news back in 2023 saying he is taking a much needed break from software development.

further googling revealed a new hobby he picked up - street photography. i found his unsplash page and i dare say the pictures are really dope. the drab feel of some of the landscape shots reminds me of some pictures i took on my trip to switzerland in 2023.

i started taking photography a bit seriously in the early 2010s along with a subset of my friends. we had a group where we shared evocative pictures we had taken of mundane things with each other. it started from using our mobile phones, then evolved. i got my first dslr in 2016 - the canon t6i. along with it, i got an assortment of lenses and was always looking out for an excuse to take pictures. i often went on photowalks where i spent most of the day walking around town, taking pictures of things, from flowers to people to birds to buildings. it helped that i was mostly outside nigeria at this time and had a lot of freedom in terms of locations i could shoot without having someone walk up to me with some made up rule about being in a photography-free zone.

i run a business in nigeria, so the honeymoon wasn’t going to last long. my photography became limited to taking pictures of friends when they visit, or covering events at the office before we hired a media team. over time, my camera became more ornamental than functional. then covid hit, and we were all stuck indoors. that was when the r5 was announced and released. it immediately became a dream camera for me and i couldn’t wait to get my hands on one although at the same time, i couldn’t justify the cost.

2 years later, at a company retreat, my cofounder and i were talking and he made a reference to back when i obsessively took pictures with my camera. i hadn’t stopped taking pictures - phone cameras had gotten better over time, and i actively captured on my iphone. i’m not sure what it was, but the conversation woke something up in me, and when i got back to my room that night, i placed an order for the r5, along with a few lenses.

in the 3 years since then, i have come to take a shit ton of pictures across the spectrum. okay fine, mostly of people. i host brunches at mine on sundays and use that as an opportunity to capture people being themselves and interacting with the room (or distracted by their phones). i share albums of these with the respective subjects once i’m done working on the images. one thing i have come to terms with is that i do well at composing candids and suck at posed shots. in fact, i once joked about titling a potential future exhibition of my photographs “unprompted”.

that said, i still put myself through the paces and capture landscapes (and still life in general) when i can. pictures with human subjects are easily more emotive than ones without, and the work is composing the shot in a manner that evokes something in the viewer. the world is vast, and there’s so much beauty to be captured and documented. i have a twitter account to showcase my photography but as of today, most of my shots remain private for various reasons - chief of which can be distilled as curation fatigue. i have plans to setup a photography website later this year so maybe that will help.

i can’t wait to fully embrace my inner tj holowaychuk.