Dear friend, Thank you so much for accompanying me along this journey. I hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. The end of a journey is always a bit bitter-sweet. I have poured my entire heart, soul, and being into researching, writing, and designing this book— and I am quite proud of the final outcome. But remember at the end of the day, it is just a guide and a manual; not a bible you should mindlessly follow. Always read all these lessons with a skeptical eye. Even though these master photographers are great, they are still fallible human beings (like the rest of us). Many of these photographers still succumbed to envy, grief, frustration, and jealousy (of other photographers). They didn’t have all of their shit figured out, and neither do we. Ultimately we need to all pave our own path and life in photography. So don’t follow the masters blindly; be a good pupil and always question the teacher. After all, the
In writing this book, I had a lot of ups-and-downs. I got my backpack stolen while in Paris and thought without a laptop I couldn’t write the book. But I followed the ancient proverb: “Hunger breeds sophistication.” I ended up writing most of the text for the book on my smartphone, synced it via Evernote, and designed the whole thing on an iPad and Apple Pages. For this eBook edition, I used the iBooks author tool. The lesson it taught me was this: don’t let any of your external circumstances in life hold you back from creating. Your creativity, aspirations and ideas are limitless. You have no boundaries to your imagination. The only boundary you have is your own mental limits. The limits are never your lack of money, lack of time, lack of opportunity, or the lack of equipment. If you have any other ambitious photography projects, ignore what everybody else says. Follow your own heart and bliss. You only live one life, and it is short. Why waste it living according to the expectations of others? Devote every waking moment to creating your art.
teachers are also students at the end of the day. 245