i take pictures

What else is there to know about me?


okay, fine. a little bio

As you may have already guessed from the title of my site, my name is Kevin. My last name is Zhang. Kevin Zhang.

I'm currently a second-year student at the University of Waterloo, studying electrical engineering. It's a tough program, but I find a lot of enjoyment from it. Digging deep into the technical details of how the technologies we use and take granted every day really gives me a sense of appreciation of the ingenuity and innovation required to make these things work.

So aside from taking pictures, I also enjoy working on small software projects, like this site! Although it's literally just a website, it's been one of the proudest things I have made so far, since I get to incorporate my skills in development along with some of my hobbies -- photography! More about the site can be found below.

Anyways, I'll pad this section out with more information about myself to make potential employers happy.

I do the things I do not because it shows that I am capable of doing something, but because it challenges me invest myself into learning a new technology or think a different way to achieve what I want to achieve. Or maybe I just think that something is really hecking cool and I want to somehow, in one way or another, replicate that. Either way, each endeavor pushes me to work at the edges of what I am comfortable with and forces myself to seek knowledge to aid me in what I want to do.

As a byproduct, I've picked up a lot of useful skills over the years like learning how to CAD, make games, control a robot, or efficiently design electrical circuits. I want to constantly get myself involved in projects that can put these things to use, and hopefully meet some really cool people along the way!


about the site

This site was something that I had been wanting to do for a long time, but just lacked the time and knowledge to actually push out something. From creating the index.html file to me writing out this paragraph, there was about four month's worth of time in between. Of course, most of that work was all crammed into a weeklong period of pure HTML and CSS grinding into what you are reading right now.

Honestly, I really wasn't sure with how I wanted to go about building the site -- whether I was just gonna edit a blog theme on hexo.io, use a prebuilt template and modify that, or even buying design off somewhere like Squarespace. Well, I did none of those and kind of just built this entire thing from the ground up.

Of course, I relied heavily on YouTube videos and other courses to get me started and build something. I also abused the absolute shit out of Bootstrap; their entire library of preset and JavaScript thingies are a godsend. I think I wanna try dabble in a bit of that kind of JavaScript development myself, but for now this is pretty adequate.

Just a quick little shout-out: this entire site is inspired by Michal Huniewicz. Be sure to check his work out! Recommend giving this one a look: Road to North Korea.


future plans


fix my shit code

So, I highly advise not looking through the source code of my site if you are any kind of web developer who knows their stuff, because you will probably want to commit seppuku to honour your eyes from seeing my spaghetti code.

Everything on here is currently a just mishmash of flex boxes that I have no idea how to manipulate, along with styling that sometimes use variables, sometimes hard-coded values, sometimes px, other times rem, along with randommly-ordered CSS properties. Just don't look at it.

Anyways, just shitting on my website because I want to introduce some areas of improvement. Basically just maybe somehow probably implement some better practices and be more consistent with how I group my rules and properties. That's gonna take a lot of refactoring.


manage my content better

Another thing is how content on my site is managed. Right now, since it's all just pure HTML and CSS, all the pictures other content are all baked into the flesh of the site. Meaning, that if I want to changed up the pictures on my page then I have to go into the HTML and manually make those changes, which is tedious and no elegant. To better manage the content, I've considered (get this) content management systems like Contentful and Contentstack. However, I don't think they have a plan for individuals like me so I just plan on making one myself. Why not? I can just learn some PHP and MySQL and with a lot of procrastination I'll have my very own CMS to M my C!


make an actual blog

You know, I have a link on my nav that says "blog" for a reason. And everything that I am writing here should actually just go in there instead. But then that needs its own design, some system to organize all of my posts which will probably require some sort of CMS which I do not how to work with yet...

I mean maybe I can just make a static page that contains the content of each rambling I go on.

Maybe. I'll get to that soon-ish.


make this site dynamic

Currently, this site is just being hosted on GitHub Pages which is fine, but no it's actually not fine it's horrible for the kind of site I want this to be. The entire point of this site is to share my photography and maybe my thoughts on blog posts if I ever get around to making that work but the current state of how everything is handled on the backend makes it very tedious and error-prone because theRE IS NO BACKEND TO MANAGE MY CONTENT okay I think I'm just repeating myself right now you know what I want sajdfkhaslhfkaj


about my gear


i hecking love nikon


the metal (and plastic)

I am a loyal Nikon enjoyer and I don't have any plans to switch to a different ecosystem anytime soon. I used to shoot a lot of digital with my trusty D810 with plans to upgrade to the D850 or even Z7ii, but I've been all about analog lately.

I originally wanted to purchase the Nikon F3, but then I realized I'm too much of a caveman and enjoy the all-mechanical aspect of the F2 better, then realized I'm too poor to afford either one, let alone find them readily available locally. However, I did end up stumbling on this gold mine of a deal on Kijiji: a Nikkormat FTn for only $50. You bet your ass I put that thing to good use. Probably put around 15 rolls of (EXPENSIVE ASS) film through it in less than a month. You should check out the shots :3

My descent into the film photography also led me to buying purchasing two Nikon L35AFs. One I bought an impulsively because it was "only" $80 or so on Etsy but ended up not working. However, I was lucky and the seller was nice enough refund me for the camera. The other one I bought for a less attractive price at $225 but is mostly functional, good enough to get some rolls of film through. I think I have an addiction.

For more of my thoughts on the film bodies I have, go to my analog section.


the glass

I don't even know why I have this many.

  • AF-S NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8G
    • The old reliable. The nifty fifty. Sharp, nimble, and delivers that scrumptious bokeh.
  • Rokinon 85mm f/1.4
    • Great for portraits. I mean, you can also shoot stuff other than portraits, but yeah, this is what it's good for. Not as sharp, chromatic aberration is pretty bad, but hey it absolutely obliterates the background at f/1.4.
  • Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3
    • Yes, the superzoom with optical stabilization. Jack of all trades, with deplorable focus breathing. Not much else to really say about this lens, though. Just great if you only wanna take one lens with you and you have no idea what you wanna shoot.
  • Tamron 19-35mm f/3.5-4.5
    • So I was originally planning on buying the 14-24mm f/2.8 for $720 at a clearance sale, but I found this guy instead. Don't get me wrong, $720 for that lens is a steal, but this full frame Tamron was only $175! $175!! I don't know why this lens is valued so low because this thing is great. Reasonably sharp, pretty wide field of view, loud focus motor, and it has a 77mm filter thread! It's no f/2.8 lens, but do you really need a fast lens if you're going wide?
  • Nikon 50mm f/1.8 Series E
    • Another one so I can use it on my FTn. Buttery smooth focus ring, tactile aperture ring, excellent optics.
  • Sigma 75-200mm f/3.8 AF
    • This one is super weird. Can barely find any information on it online. It features a push-pull zoom mechanism, clicky aperture ring, and a constant f/3.8 at all focal lengths. Maybe Sigma just wanted to one-up the the world of f/4 zooms. On my lens specifically, one of the spring-loaded contacts is missing their spring, so it doesn't make full contact on AF bodies like my D810, causing it to spas out. I just took it out and now it's just a fully manual lens with a shitty focus ring. Not that I ever really intend to use this for digital shooting anyway.
  • Zoom-NIKKOR 43-86mm f/3.5
    • Ah yes, the worst lens Nikon has ever made, the lens that severely tainted the reputation of Nikon glass for a while. So naturally I bought it. Okay, maybe I clickbaited you a little since I got the version with the higher serial number, meaning that it was a later, revised model that fixed a lot of the issues the initial version had. It's overall a very fun lens to use with a satisfying push-pull zoom, and s m o o t h focus ring. The odd focal length also adds to its quirkiness.

that's it for now

There's probably a lot more to discuss, but I'll save that for now. More to come in the future.

ยฉ2022 Kevin Zhang