My Current Insanities

Everything is telling me that this was taken with the Olympus Pen EE-2. It’s in the right folder. The dimensions fit. It has that sort of fuzzy quality.

But the DoF and shutter speed (frozen water) makes me think it was taken with my Pentax MX.

Iz confused.

This was taken at Kanbashira Shrine in Miyakonojo.

I have a number of pictures of the city of Nagasaki in the snow. I should probably repost them to Flickr since it’s new and sexy.

Of all of my trips around Kyushu, Nagasaki was both the best and the worst of my experiences. The city is aggressively lovely and photogenic. Every neighborhood calls out to you. If you’re a more serious photographer than I (and you are), you’d be in hog heaven.

The downside is that for a famous city known for being a central point in Japan’s history with the rest of the world, it sure is small and lacking in attractions outside of the (important and interesting) history it provides. Once you’ve seen all the pretty stuff, which you can get done in a day or two, you’re stuck waiting for the malls to open at ten. I had booked myself there for five days. By the third day I was wandering the back streets looking for something to catch my eye.

I’d love to live there, mind you. It seems perfect for that.

Shot with my old Mamiya C220f. I’ll see if I can’t post up the rest of the photos I took with it that week. They were quite nice, in my not-so-humble opinion.

As a prelude to the inevitable let down, here’s something I’m drawing.

It’s fun to be using a blue pencil again.

Top: If I recall correctly, about once a month the shopping area in downtown Miyazaki has some sort of event. Typically a song and dance show put on by the local dance studio outside of the Yamakataya. I would go and have a photo walk with my old pal Peter every couple of months. The timing was hard to sort out since he’s a man with family and I lived an hour away.

Bottom: Speak of the devil… Peter always had a great rapport with his street photography subjects. I’d always be in the corner like a spider, setting up photo traps and waiting for someone to step into my depth of field, and he’d just be walking right up to people and snapping away. After he’d show them the shots he took. He never got a snarl.

That’s what self confidence gets yah, folks.

Both shots were taken with an Olympus Pen EP-3.

Top;

I’ve seen this traditional dance school(?) perform a few times in Miyakonojo’s big summer street festival. There was nothing special about that night. I went out because I was hot and wanted to point my camera at something, but I wasn’t expecting much. I found this down in the bar district which was a better find than the drunks and bar girls that are usually there.

Shot with a Mamiya C220f.

Bottom;

For winter vacation one year I spent a few days in Fukuoka. I had just gotten my hands on some 3200iso film and wanted to use it so I did a walkabout. This fellow was both busking and selling what looked like bootleg DVDs in front of the subway entrance. It reminded me a fair bit of a typical Seoul street scene minus the fighting and vomiting.

For the most part, interesting people stuff doesn’t happen in Japan until after nine or ten.

Shot with a Nikon F2.

One final one for now. This was shot with a cheapo cellphone.

Of these four cameras that I no longer own, the Olympus Pen EE-2 is the one I’d probably buy again with little humming and hawing. Such a convenient little sucker. Pity it got moldy and had to die.

Poking through an old portable hard drive today, in case you’re wondering.

This one is going way back. This is Seoul. The view out my window during the annual Chinese air poisoning of the nations around it. Adding with the generally shitty air of western Korea this stuff put me in the hospital each time to get treated from some sort of lung infection. If I ever return to Korea for some reason (money) I’ll be skipping Seoul for some place slightly out of the main path. Not that there’s much escape. It sometimes even got as far south as Miyazaki.

According to my files, this was taken with a Konica/ Minolta Dimage Z. My mother has it in her closet somewhere. It worked for her for the better part of a decade before giving up the ghost. Which is quite impressive for a low end digital camera, I feel.

A classic from the archives. The week I arrived in Japan, this was all I had.

This was taken with a Mamiya C220f. A goodly camera, that.

Requiem For Methuselah is another one of those bad-but-not-bad-enough-to-be-notable third season Star Trek episodes.

The crew is dying from space flu so our dynamic trio beams down to Planet Cure to meet an immortal guy named Flint and his hot robot girlfriend. Kirk gets his mack on with the robot girl, Spock guesses the plot twist early but tries not to ruin it for everyone, and Bones is the only one who seems to care that the crew are dying. But this doesn’t stop him and the others from gleefully guzzling Flint’s space brandy while the plot happens to them.

This one supports my suspicion that even the writers hated the third season which is why they wrote the characters in maximum bitch mode every episode. It’s McCoy’s turn this episode. Check out this monologue from Bones at the end of the episode;

“You see, I feel sorrier for you than I do for him because you’ll never know the things that love can drive a man to. The ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures, the glorious victories. All of these things you’ll never know simply because the word love isn’t written into your book.”

Jesus fuck, Bones! That was harsh. No wonder Spock threw himself into that reactor.

______

Screencap from Trekcore, of course.

Alright, this is more like it. I have a pretty good work flow in GIMP now. And I’m satisfied with the line quality now.

I guess I should finish that script then…

Halp! My mother’s baking keeps falling into my tummy somehow. I think the milk is chasing it there!

It possibly wants a cheeseburger. I don’t know what it’s thoughts on monorails and civil disobedience are.

A test panel for hand lettering in GIMP.

I figured out a couple of things a bit too late while drawing this that I’m going to be mindful of for the next time. Mostly to do with the drawing resolution and scaling which is why it’s a bit jaggy. I should also be able to find the sweet spot between this final size and the working size as far as lettering goes armed with what I learned.

Overall, this was a very useful bit of drawing exercise. A good use of my evening.