The Beginning of Funny Bunny Photography

Posted March 11, 2013 at 10:33 am in beginnings and endings, friends, happiness, japan, love, New York City, San Francisco Bay Area, tsunami

Fair warning, y’all – this story has a small, sappy ending, but it’s tough to get through. Don’t want a downer on your Monday? Skip the read! I’ll be posting a new engagement session on Tuesday!

My friend, Taylor, and I, dressing up and posing for the camera at Otakon 2007, one month after we met.

In some ways, nothing has changed since March 11, 2011 – I stayed up late, trying to get work done, but mostly refreshing my google rss feeds. An eternal insomniac. The difference between now and two years ago is that while I watched the tsunami flood Sendai Airport on the news, I didn’t know that my best friend was already dead.

As the situation disintegrated over the next week, news agencies in the US grasped at the few Americans who were missing in the earthquake’s aftermath, even causing a false report that Taylor had been found alive. In my case, I was sitting in San Francisco airport a week later waiting to get on a plane back to New York, when I got a text from a friend saying only, “I’m so sorry.” And, feeling a sick knot in my stomach, that was when I learned that Taylor’s remains had been found, and I had a 6 hour flight to get through. The kind man seated on my left, speaking broken English, tried his best to understand why the crazy girl next to him was leaking tears, but all he could really manage was, “But… I thought… this earthquake. A long time ago, last week, yes?”

My momentum, which had finally been building toward a graduate degree in premodern Japanese literature, came to a dead stop. It was never that I stopped loving Japan. But I missed class to sit in the dark and cry, I didn’t want to read anymore, I didn’t know who I was without Taylor standing in the background, cheering me on. By the middle of April, it was clear to me that unless something drastic changed, I would never be able to finish my degree. My boyfriend, and a handful of friends, persuaded me to put the decision off for a couple months.

Grappling with Taylor’s death between March and July, I couldn’t get over how inconsequential my Japanese literature work suddenly seemed. I collected every picture I could find of Taylor and put them all into one huge collection, and looking at us together, always happy and always having a ridiculously good time, I knew what I wanted. I knew what Taylor would have wanted for me. We both wanted to be happy, and, more than that, we wanted the people we met to be full of laughter and endless positivity.

Suddenly, I found myself sitting in coffee shops all over New York City, poring over wedding magazines and dreaming up how the photographer must have directed the couple. I wasn’t picking up my Japanese dictionary when I left the apartment anymore. I was picking up my camera instead. I walked around the city, looking at couples, imagining what they might look like in front of my lens. Where before I had only taken on photography jobs to add some spice to my academic life, I now redoubled my efforts to shadow photographers and soak up all their knowledge.

By July, I knew I never wanted to go back. I submitted my withdrawal papers, and moved to the Bay Area to open my own photography studio. My studio came out of my love for Taylor, and our love of sharing in life’s happiness. I want to capture every single moment at my clients’ weddings. I know how precious they are because we don’t always have the time we think we will, and it’s so important to concentrate on what matters the most – love.

Funny Bunny Photography is my love song to all of you, and my photos are the greatest gifts I know how to give.