More photos after the jump…

It’s hard to find time to do everything I need to do these days.

In other news, I crave a 70″ octobox. Too bad my apartment is literally too small to be able to use one.

*sigh*

A few more photos after the jump.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and here’s to hoping I update more than once every three months….

Real life (and work) will do that to you, I suppose. I’ve actually taken quite a few photos over the past 8 weeks, but have been sitting on them since I haven’t had time to process them. Perhaps now that I’m finally got a couple of days to myself over the winter break?

Well, best start working through the backlog now! A few weeks ago the lovely Satomi and I decided to get out of the city for a bit and headed over to Oyama-san in neighboring Kanagawa prefecture for some mountain air and a bit of autumn leaf peeping.

Turns out we were a little bit late for the autumn-leaf viewing part (though we did spy a few!) but we still had a grand old time. Nothing quite like hiking up a mountain and enjoying a picnic at the top to invigorate the spirit! And believe me when I say “hike” is the appropriate verb to use here – I don’t think I’ve climbed this many stairs in many, many months – the next day my thighs were complaining whenever I so much as looked at them, let alone try to stand up or walk anywhere *laughs*

Not much else to say other than that, so enjoy the rest of the photos after the jump!

Well, that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more photos (hopefully I’ll update again before another two months pass haha). Happy new year everyone!

I really enjoy looking at “street snap” type fashion photography sites, such as this, this, this or of course the father of them all, this. And even though I imagine most people (judging from the comments) are reading these blogs for the fashion, for me, it’s the people – and the moment frozen in time – that are the most interesting. I find myself wishing for more context – and would gladly trade the standard series of “bust, full body, accessory closeups” shots that usually pepper these posts – for a few words from the subject of the photograph themselves. (Some publications get closer, with commentary provided by the blog author, but that’s still context filtered through the lens (so to speak) of the photographer, and subject to the biases inherent in that.)

The other thing that I notice about these sites – and this is certainly not a diss by any means – is that the photography is, for the most part, very much “snapshot” like. It may well be that this is intentional – these are “street snap” type of blogs – but yet I find that relative to my tastes, the photographs are too dark, the framing much too wide, the backgrounds too distracting, the subjects lost in all the visual noise and riot of colours, textures and general hubbub of everything occurring around them. So often I find myself looking at a photo on these sites and wondering – “what am I supposed to be looking at in this photo?”

Of course, that’s not to say that every photo needs to be a super bright, tight up crop of a face of course. And I think that my preference in the style is informed in large part by my desire to have more emphasis placed on the person – and their story – rather than their fashion or accessories. Some might (rightfully) suggest that what I’m looking for would better be served by watching documentaries, or else reading Rolling Stone interviews photographed by Annie Leibovitz than internet street fashion blogs – and yet I find myself drawn both to the creative/artistic (hipster?) sensibilities that informs street fashion blogs and also to the fundamental notion of taking a camera, walking out on the street and taking impromptu-yet-semi-posed photographs of people who look interesting (and fashionable). I wonder to myself if it is possible to combine the two styles into one – preserve the subject matter and core principles of the street fashion blogs, but marry it to a slightly brighter, more focused style that places greater emphasis on the person and less on their clothing.

Along with this, one of the questions I’ve been trying to answer recently is whether it’s possible to take a good photograph (or at least one in the style I prefer) – out on the street in under 7 seconds a shot. Well I mean, of course it is, but rather is it possible for me to do that, and to do it consistently? It’s easy when you’re in a studio, with external lighting, stable environment, and a host of assistants, but out on the street, with shifting conditions and lighting and an unpredictable background (and sometimes foreground!), it can get a lot trickier. From a technical standpoint, it means knowing your equipment inside and out, having a good assistant with a reflector, and most of all, knowing how to pose people who don’t pose for a living.

I was assisting my photography senpai a few weeks ago with some portrait shoots of aspiring models at a modeling agency and was struck with the importance that being able to pose someone plays in the overall success (or failure) of a photograph. It sounds obvious of course, and we can all tell when someone looks awkward or natural in a photograph, but until you watch a professional (such as the head of the agency who was instructing the girls) pose – and tell someone how to pose – you can’t really understand what an art it is. It’s not enough to only know the basic ways in which people can look good in a photograph – it’s also being able to effectively and quickly communicate that to the subject whilst keeping them at ease and entertained. It’s a skill that any people photographer needs, and it’s probably the most difficult thing of all when you’re shooting people on the street who aren’t use to posing – or being posed.

(More after the keep reading link below.)

(As an aside – if you’ve ever thought to yourself that modeling must be the easiest gig in the world, trust me when I say that it is not. After watching those poor girls get laboriously drilled for hours on end on even the most minute details of the way they stand, cross their hands or tilt their necks, I have nothing but sympathy for people who have to do that for a living, under hot lights, heavy makeup and in heels. Also whilst getting stared at by drunkards and bums as they posed for outdoor shots in the sweltering 30C heat at noon, but I did not pick the location where we did the shooting, and in retrospect the person who did probably should have hired a location scout.)

Anyway, these photos are my first experiment in trying to take bright, focused photographs out on the street, with someone who has never posed before, and do it all in less than seven seconds per shot. I still have a long way to go, but I’m fortunate enough to have patient and understanding friends always willing to help me out (although one suspects they might be doing it solely for our yummy waffle break halfway through the shoot ♥).

More photos below.

That’s it for now! Thanks for reading! And if you liked the photos in this post, you might also be interested in these below:

• Ocean Style
• Autumn Style II
• Street Style III
• Street Style II
• Studio Style I
• The rest of the photoshoot archives

Nonetheless, the blue skies of summer have been out over Tokyo in force recently (accompanied by a ferocious sun and ridiculous temperatures in the high 30s – it got up to 39C on Thursday!) and I decided it was high time to drag myself and my wide-angle out to take some photos of something.

Originally I was going to climb a mountain and get some nature, but I’ve had the striking misfortune of being sick all week (this is actually the second time I’ve been sick in less than a month, wtf?!) so I figured that probably wasn’t the wisest idea in the world. And with the temperatures being what they were, I wasn’t sure venturing somewhere outside of Tokyo would be a good idea either, so instead I opted to stop by the Nishi-Roku Tire Park in Kamata.

I don’t really remember how I first heard of this place (I think the lovely Bethann told me about it?), and it’s not particularly famous. What it is, however, is a random park filled with random piles of tires shaped into random sculptures like robots, dragons, dinosaurs and so forth. I think it’s actually aimed at kids and families, although when I went there last week there were precious few people there – a couple wilting from the heat, a dog panting in the shade, and two mothers with their children, although the children seemed more interested in playing with the water fountain than with the pitch-black tires radiating ungodly amounts of heat.

Anyway, it was a fairly interesting place to visit (though I recommend you do so on a day when you’re not in imminent danger of dying from heatstroke every 30 minutes or so) and is less than a 10 minute walk from Kamata station. If we’re being honest here, there not much reason to visit Kamata besides this tire park (itself a fairly dubious reason to visit) – believe me, I looked. However, Kamata is only a few minutes train ride from Shinagawa so you know, if you’re bored and/or really, really love tires (or tire dinosaurs), then you should take a look.

More photos after the jump.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

Oddly enough, I shot these almost exactly one year later in exactly the same neighborhood as the previous installment of Street Style II.

More photos after the jump…

Sorry for the lack of posts… real life and work keep rudely intruding on my blogging time

More updates to come soon, I promise!

All work and no play, as they say, makes Panda (depressed? miserable?) a dull boy (I have actually never watched The Shining, it just occurred to me) so and on top of that I have wanted to go take photos of a haikyo for some time, so a couple of weeks ago a car was rented, gear was prepared and iphone maps were called up at the spur of the moment and off we went for some haikyo-snapping adventures.

Our destination was the abandoned Inatori Smallpox Ward (稲取隔離病棟)located over in the Izu Peninsula. We had first seen some photographs of this over on another website and thought it to be fairly accessible in terms of a weekend trip, but still interesting enough that it was worth a look.

The actual place itself is obviously not on any maps; even the road which were described as being markers by which to orient yourself had long ago been subsumed into the ground, buried in a landslide after an earthquake decades ago, and replaced by a new, similarly-named road which ran in a different, misleading direction. As a result, it took us a while to actually find the place, involving a lot of driving back and forth through a narrow cliffside highway, and even a brief trepidatious detour down what was seriously the scariest tunnel I have ever been in in my entire life – pitch black, barred with fencing on one end, broken glass and debris everywhere, water (or something) dripping from the ceilings, a cave-in on the other side with only a single wavering shaft of thin fading light illuminating the end…. we half expected zombies or crazed murderers to come flying out of there at any point!

(It was a very scooby-doo esque adventure, let me tell you, us creeping through the dark clutching each other and our shaking flashlights (hastily purchased at the 100 yen store because we didn’t even think to bring flashlights at first!!))

When we did finally find the place, it was amusing to see just how close to the new modern highway it was – definitely hidden, and requiring one to park in a spot they’re not really supposed to park, and scramble down a steep incline of rocks and overgrown vegetation. But it was well worth it – despite being located right next to the highway, (and apparently having been visited by many haikyo-enthusiasts over the years) the ward itself seemed preserved from another era, dramatically crumbled, worn down and fascinatingly silent.

There’s not much to say about it other than that – the pictures, I hope, demonstrate the thing that struck me the most – the fact that nature – and nature alone – did this to a manmade structure over the course of only a few short years. It’s amazing to think that absent any external intervention even the sturdiest of buildings can be overrun and absorbed by their natural surroundings so quickly. Of course, seeing this only made me want to go on more haikyo adventures, so I’m hoping this won’t be my last opportunity to photograph such things!

More (a bunch more, actually – I should have edited more) photos after the jump below.

Okay that’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

Mercifully there were not nearly as many people on the mountain as the last time I was there – so far Golden Week this year seems a lot more subdued than normal, probably as a result of all that transpired in the last couple of months.

I actually didn’t take many photos of the mountain itself, probably because we were too busy stuffing our faces with yummy homemade avocado sammiches and talking to mascara-and-origami-sombrero-wearing finger puppets in a French accent.

(Because obviously that is what one does when one climbs mountains in Japan, people.)

A few more random pictures after the jump.

That’s it for now. Thankfully, vacation is at last upon us which means I might finally find some time to updated with a longer post and try to catch up on life… Stay tuned.

Completely unrelated to this post, but so much is changing in my life at the moment. I feel like I’ve been going non-stop for the last month, and the speed only keeps picking up. I scarcely have time to catch my breath, let alone blog.

(A pre-emptive excuse, perhaps, for why this post is so perfunctory, and consists almost entirely of photos?)

I can’t wait for spring and the cherry blossoms and warm weather to come and for life to settle down a little bit.

More photos after the jump.

Okay, that’s it for now. More stuff coming soon!

(Bigger version here)

More pictures after the jump.

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(Bigger version here)

Okay that’s it for now. Thanks for reading!