About
The photos on this site were all taken by me during my continuing travels through southeast Asia from 2002 through the present and are all copyrighted.
I’m Steve Goodman and this is my photoblog. My other sites include my blog, and my home page. I have been traveling in SE Asia for the past four years. I was born in Detroit and have also lived in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, California, Bangkok Thailand and Phnom Penh Cambodia where I currently reside.
I have traveled extensively in the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Nepal and India.
For more than 20 years I lived a rather conventional life with a career in sales, marketing and management of high-tech hardware, software and Internet companies, but have been taking a “sabbatical” for the past five and a half years. I’m a very lucky guy.
I spend my time learning, reading, doing photography, playing guitar, listening to music, traveling, meditating and walking around to see what’s going on in this world of inestimable beauty.
We can’t choose who our family is or what we look like. There are lots of other things we can’t choose either, but we can choose to be good and even to transcend whatever current circumstances may prevail.
I’m a fun-loving, yet serious person. Private and independent.
I majored in Philosophy and still putter away at it in my mind. Got a soft spot in my heart for Buddhism and I actually studied with the 14th Dalai Lama at his temple near Dharamsala in India a few year ago. So at least I’ve got that going for me.
Really I am nothing at all. Its OK. I absolutely refuse to define myself by, or conform to any standard or convention. Question authority. Break the dominant paradigm. Impeach George Bush NOW! Think for yourself!
Right now I’m still traveling and living in southeast Asia and looking for ways to make a living here. Positive vibration!
Interests:
liberty, freedom, fun, possibilities, art, music, Grateful Dead, Buddhism, psychedelia, travel, Jazz, guitar, digital photography, friends, communities, solitude, meditation, books, writing, critical thinking, ideas, blogs, blogging, stimulation, random acts of kindness, other stuff
I’ve been a photographer since I was about ten years old and I think my first camera was a Polaroid Swinger. In junior high school I was the president of the camera club and actually invited girls into the darkroom “to see what develops”. My parents wouldn’t agree to send me to school for photography, so I ended-up getting a dgree in philosophy and english literature instead. Making photographs is my favorite pastime. For me it is a transcendental zen-like experience to compose and shoot photos and also to view them once they are printed or displayed on the web.
My photographs fall into a variety of categories I suppose, if you’re into labeling things like that. Some street photography, are social documentary works, portraits, urban landscapes, even fine art.
As of August 2006 I’m using the new Nikon D200. Prior to that I was shooting with a Nikon D70 digital SLR since June 2005. I used to have a SONY CyberShot DSC-75, an old Minolta film SLR and an even older Argus C3. I’ve also had a variety of Polaroid cameras over the years.
My equipment and software tools currently include:
CAMERA EQUIPMENT
- Nikon D200 digital SLR camera body - 10.2 megapixels
- Nikon D70 digital SLR camera body - 6.1 Megapixels
- Nikon SB-800 Speedlight
- AF-S DX Nkkor ED 12-24mm f/4G IF Lens - This is an awesome wide angle lens.
- AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor ED 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF Lens - Good all-purpose zoom lens that came with the D70.
- AF Zoom Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G Lens - This lens is my least used and least favorite. Gotta use a tripod with it.
- Sigma 105mm Macro f2.8 EX DG Macro Lens - For those super close-up shots.
- AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D Lens - A fantastic lens for shooting portraits in less than ideal lighting conditions.
SOFTWARE
Adobe PhotoShop CS2
ACDSee 8
RawShooter Premium
DxO Optics Pro 4.0
Neat Image
Picassa
Flickr
WordPress
Typepad
Quotes
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera.
- Paul Strand
It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
- Dorothea Lange
I photograph to find out what something will look like as a photograph.
- Gary Winograd
Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don;t see.
- Emmet Gowin
Life itself is not reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.
- Frederick Sommer
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
- Diane Arbus
Photographs furnish evidence.
- Susan Sontag
I’m always mentally photographing everything as practice…. the state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank. When looking for pictures… The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.
- Minor White
I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines [our press]. They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life. I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation and deeper. This is my project.
- Garry Winogrand
Most of my photographs are compssionate, gentle, and personal. They tend to let the viewer see himself. The tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art.
- Bruce Davidson
Thinking should be done before and afterwards, never while actually taking a photograph.
What is there more fugitive and transitory than the expression on a human face?
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
A photograph is a secret about a secret.
- Diane Arbus
The hundreth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal.
- Hart Carne
In my view you can not claim to realyl ahve seen something unti lyu have photographed it.
- Zola
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
- Wallace Stevens
While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret charcter with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up - and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more.
- Susan Sontag
You can photograph anything now.
- Robert Frank
Photography is magic. You can stop time itself. Catch slivers of moments to savor and share time and again. Tell beautiful silver stories, one photo alone, or many playing together to form a book. A photograph is a sharing, it says “Hey, look at this!”, it’s a miracle, is what it is. And when you’re going good and you get a new picture you love, there’s nothing better. That’s the joy of photography, and the fun.
- Jill Freedman
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
- Walker Evans
The camera is my tool. Through it I give reason to everything around me.
- Andre Kertesz
“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
- Dorothea Lange
“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”
-Garry Winogrand
