About the series
Taipei is a city of layers. The MRT whisks people between glass towers, while five minutes away, a grandmother sells braised pork from a stall her family has run for forty years. I spent a year walking the older districts with a small mirrorless camera, looking for the moments where those layers touch.
Approach
Shot almost entirely between 5 am and 9 am, before the heat and crowd. Natural light only. I processed every frame in Lightroom with a single export preset so the series reads as cohesive despite the variety of subjects.
The restraint was intentional — no dramatic edits, no filters. The city provides enough texture on its own.
What I learned
Patience is the main skill in street photography. You find a good light and wait. Sometimes thirty minutes pass and nothing happens; sometimes the frame appears in two seconds. Knowing when to move on is as important as knowing when to stay.
Coming from a product background, I found it valuable to work without iteration loops — a street photograph is done the moment the shutter fires.