A Trip to Taipei, Taiwan

Hello everyone!
First, I would like to introduce myself, just in case you found me from this article before my homepage.
My name is Natasha and I am a photographer based in Seoul, South Korea. Most of my works are portrait, food, product and street photography.

I have been doing photography since the year 2015. I started off as a video editor for a wedding production company and slowly I branched out to food photography and also doing company profile videos as my earliest commercial projects. But when the 2020 pandemic hit, I lost my job.

For the longest time I didn't operate my camera and was in a deep career slump. Because everything stopped for at least 2 years until the borders are finally reopened and the economy recovered.

During that time, I cooked, I opened a food business, met my husband and got married just by the end of the quarantine period. Shortly after, I left Indonesia, my home country and moved to Seoul, South Korea. I traveled to different parts of Asia together with my husband.

One day I discovered that he actually owned a Full-frame DSLR, that hasn't been used for such a long time.
It was dusty, so I cleaned it and decided to bring it with me on our winter trip to Jeju Island. In Jeju, I took a lot of landscape photos, felt a sense of rebirth as I captured the sceneries. But during that season of my life, taking photography seriously again, as a career, still hadn't come to mind.

For those of you who are wondering, if I was a photographer, why didn't I bring my camera with me to Seoul?

As I told you earlier, the deep and dark slump I was in during the pandemic made me gave up on pursuing my career as a creative. So I let my mid-range DSLR rot in the cupboard and just forget that I was once a professional photographer.

It was until September 2023, that I finally changed my mind.

A trip to Taipei, one of my dream destinations since high school, was the light at the end of the tunnel for me. Though I didn't realize it up to the moment my husband told me that my shots in Taipei were different. He said, it had something that he had never seen nor felt before.

Mind you, I never told him that I was a professional photographer back in Indonesia. I just didn't feel the need to because I buried that dream when my career suffered so badly in 2021.

Here are some of the pictures that took him by surprise.
You can click them individually to see the full image.

Through these images, he encouraged me to consider taking photography as a career, instead of just a hobby. At that time, I haven't made any decision on applying to work full time anywhere yet. All of my jobs were freelanced and most of them are translating and interpreting jobs.

I went home from Taipei, with a lot to ponder.

Aside from the beauty and the amount of pictures that I needed to edit, I was also trying to regain my confidence as a photographer. I have been so quiet about it, none of my newer friends even know that I was a professional photographer & editor before 2020.

It took me months to get over most of my doubts and I finally relaunch my career as a professional photographer on January of 2024.

Never looked back since.

All images Copyright © 2024 Natasha Liwang Photography All rights Reserved

Written by Natasha Liwang

Last edited April 30, 2024