Last night I changed the entire outlook of this website to be focused on photography. This is because I am doing more in this field. For example, I am picking out the best photographs from my huge collection. Then I will post some of the photos under Gallery and start to make my mark again as a fine art photographer.

The posts on this website will still be the usual, mostly about my rants, but now I will add photography related news and such.

Enjoy.

Recently I’ve been under the weather a bit, metaphorically and literally, so I have not written much. But today I changed the site a bit.

1. Updated “Notes” page a little bit.
2. Got rid of “How to RSS” page because I wrote it only for Firefox at the time. Also I’m sure there are other how to RSS pages on the web.
3. Added a new page called “Gallery” so hopefully in the near future I’ll have more photo slide shows up. This will happen only if I pick out the best pictures from my now 35,000+ photographs.

An interesting phenomenon recently happened to me and I am quite surprised by it: I started to write some poetry, or what is supposed to be poetry at least.

I guess it started a few years ago when I wrote a couple of poems but I only kept five or so. I’ve written a few now and I hope to continue doing so. I’m positively sure they are bad poems so maybe one day, after I write enough of them I will publish a book called “Bad Poems by Hiatt Zhao”.

But seriously, I enjoy writing poems. I rarely care about what it looks like in the end, which is why my poems are bad I think. To me it’s the process that makes me feel different, creative, and alive. Also I can write a short poem if my attention span is short, or a longer one if I have the patience. It is completely different from photography, which is capturing something in an instant. Poetry is more like a craft.

I always write my poems on the back of envelopes. This way I save paper and ultimately the environment. This also keeps the length of my poems to a minimum. I try to be a minimalist after all.

So in the end I suggest to anyone who is reading this to write some poems. I’m sure they are not as bad as mine.

I just completed a new book. It is called The Artistic Portfolio of Hiatt Zhao (Purchase). It is actually a portfolio I made for applying to architecture schools but it is also something I want to do for a long time as a collection of my best work.

The book is a print on demand so you can get just one copy…or more if you like.

Enjoy.