My Current Insanities

In my dream last night, I was interviewing for an ESL teaching job.

This school was somewhere in East Asia, the dream wasn’t clear on it, and was famous for being very good to it’s teachers. I arrived to find the teacher’s room set up like a kindergarten class. The teachers got free, calorie balanced meals. Nap times, play times, and a story time. By the time I excused myself to sneak out through the bathroom window, they had moved on to singalong time.

Given the infantile teaching staff odds are good that was set in South Korea. 

Oh, burn!

Anyway, the picture was a Hipstamatic thing of some kindy students in Japan wearing their Oni masks for Setsubun. It was the closest picture I had.

The latest wave leaves from Yurakucho Station in Tokyo to places unknown.

I’m pretty sure this was shot from the hip with my Konica III. What you see here was at about a twenty degree angle on the roll. I don’t think it was an accidental shot, but I’m willing to accept that possibility since the Konica III has a hair trigger. I decided to use it because I liked the path of light that went down the middle.

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.

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.

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.

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

A table away from my farewell meat-eating party was another farewell meat-eating party.

This is the HalfCamera app. It does diptychs in the style of a half frame camera.

Not just a kitty. But a Japanese kitty. A Japanese kitty that lives in a graveyard and talks to the ghosts there like in a Neil Gaiman book.

I am now the envy of the Internet!

You’re supposed to make like every photo you take was an intentional exercise of your superior skill. For the most part, artist confidence is horseshit done to make you, the viewer, feel like you’re in the presence of someone better than you at this stuff so you’ll give them money.

While I’d like your money, I won’t horseshit you. I was shooting randomly into the crowd. The auto-focus locked on to her just as she was making what I feel to be an interesting expression. I didn’t see it until I was reviewing the memory card.

The only skill I displayed was making sure the camera was on the right settings, pointed in the right direction, and pushing the shutter at the right time. This is more common than you know.

For my first two years and final month in Japan I was sleeping on a futon. Once you hit a certain age, the distance from the futon to a standing position gets a bit too far for first thing in the morning and you crave the intermediate sitting position a bed gives you.

And it’s embarrassing to have to crawl over to the wall and haul your creaking bones up like a drunk on a Sunday morning.

I found this while going through my photos.This is Shinmoedake erupting on my apartment. This sucked.

I’ve posted this up a million times on the million sites I’ve had, but I still think it’s a good one.

A Japan (And if I recall correctly Korea and Taiwan) Thang;

Most neighborhoods with a bar/pub/restaurant/ladies-of-negotiable-affection district will have these small rooms with ads of all of the local establishments on them. Some times it’s just for the businesses in the building. Sometimes just for the street.

Down the street from this shot and around the corner is one of these places which is focused on just the host and hostess clubs. The bar area was quite thick with them which is a bit surprising in a small city like Miyazaki.

Wonderful. A good philosophy to have about life, I feel.

I have a number of kid portraits that I’m quite proud of. But many of them hold too many un-editable identifiers for me to feel comfortable with posting them online so they remain something for me and their mothers alone. I can see why some folks avoid it all together.

Personally, I find the good/suck ratio for candid “street” photography like the images below this one are pretty bad. That may simply be due to my skill at that type of photography. I prefer this sort of off-the-cuff portraiture. East Asians are great to do this with since everyone is taking pictures of themselves and each other non-stop. I’d like to try it some here in Canada but everyone is so fearful I don’t think much of my chances of success…

Miyazaki city at night. You will note that the auto-focus was really good at finding the least interesting parts to lock on to. It can be a good friend most of the time, but it will betray you when you need it the most.