Little things about me
Hi, and welcome! I'm Wing, a London based photography hobbyist and developer. Urban, travel, and street are what I do the most in photography as my hobbit, and I do full stack development for living.
I started doing photography when I was 14, and it has become my biggest hobbit since then. In the first 5 years of my photography journey, all I had was a Nikon FM2 and a couple of Nikon lenses from my dad, so I was dedicated to shooting films only. That gave me solid experience in controlling the exposure as the full manual is the only available mode on FM2. Then I started buying cameras with my own money, started shooting digital, went travelling, and slowly developed my styles doing street, urban, and travel photography.
A bit more on my cameras. I used to have a Fujifilm X-E2 & X-Pro2, and now I shoot with the X100V. The retro look and physical dials on the Fujis simply won me over in every single way, like using an old film camera but also enjoying the conveniences of shooting digital. Leica is also a thing I'm obsessed with. I've collected a couple of Leica cameras over the years, both film and digital. The M6 is the first camera I bought and I'm still using it today. Yes, the Fuji and Leica may not be as fast as my Sony A7R3, the pixels count isn't as high, but I still use them much more than my Sony as long as I'm not shooting for work. Performance isn't everything. In a fast-paced world where everything gets automated, it's important that we as humans, give more input to things we do, care more about the details, and be more personalised, instead of letting the machines do everything for us. To me, it's how we keep our uniqueness, it's how we prevent ourselves become replaceable.
Moving on to my professions, focusing on programming alone, although I've never officially titled as a full stack developer, I'm pretty sure I'm one, or maybe more than that. Front end, back end, mobile apps, web, desktop apps, IoT device solutions, sometimes UI/UX design, cloud-based system designs, DevOps engineering, you name it and I probably had done something related over the past couple of years. Plus, out of programming, I also happened to get involved in the business side of things, like designing the solutions and the business models, doing customer-facing, project management, after-sales support, brewing coffee (oops😳), and such.
I often joked that the official title of my previous job should be Doraemon instead of Product Lead, as you can see that I always get involved in all different kinds of tasks. While the project management part can be boring, I do enjoy involving in the business part of things that get me involved in every single stage of the product lifecycle instead of just taking orders like a robot. To me, it's important to understand why certain requirements exist, and what's the ultimate goal of the solutions. Oftentimes there're requests from clients which don't make much sense. Simply turning down the clients is a big no-no. Instead, understanding what the client wants to achieve and counter suggest is the way I go.
*In case you have no idea what Doraemon is, it's a robot cat from a Japanese anime who can solve everything with its' tools from the future.
So, what is Devtography
Devtography is a personal brand that I started at the beginning of 2017. The name of the brand basically explained everything it does - development + photography.
The concept behind Devtography is simple, it's simply put software development & photography under one single brand and try to make them work together. This idea came from a friend of mine who said "maybe one day you can use your programming skills to benefit our photography". I couldn't think of a thing that can help us become better photographers at that time but I've kept that in mind. Around mid-2016 I started to have some ideas like developing apps to make film photography more manageable for me. Those ideas didn't just come and disappear but improved over time. Therefore, I decided to focus on products that can help photographers when I started working for my band.
Fast forward to 2022, while I'm still keeping my film logging iOS app in the garage, Devtography has become the brand I use for freelance jobs, and where I host most of my open-source projects on GitHub. Oh and I'm not forgetting the photography part, Devtography Instagram is still getting new photos every now and then, just not as often. Photography will always be part of Devtography, so make sure you check my works out there and remember, like and follow 😉