Okay here are the pics. I didn’t get as many good pictures as I wanted considering the number of them I took. I attribute this mostly to not having my cable release with me, I was basically limited to 30 sec exposures or letting the camera decide the exposure on aperture mode. Still, some came out nicely. I have more that I’ll publish some day when I get bored and have no other pictures to show.
So I’m stuck here in a netcafe in Ikebukuro until tomorrow. I took a bunch of pictures tonight/last night around Ikebukuro and my apartment, some turned out kind of OK. I still feel weird walking around the city and setting up my tripod in the middle of the busiest few square KM that exist on the planet, but whatever.
Anyway I’ll post the pictures tomorrow when I get home.
In the meantime I noticed the CAD dropped big time again. I am going to try to take advantage of this when I start sending money back there. It’s at a pathetic 77cents per 100yen now.
One possibly interesting thing is that my roommate needs the house to host a friend or two today, because they’re all going to England together and leaving tomorrow. So I’m basically screwed and have to spend the night at a netcafe or something. So I think I’m going to go to Ikebukuro and take a ton of night pictures until I get too cold to stand it anymore, then I’ll go to a netcafe or something for the rest of the night. Bleh pain in the ass.
Nothing happening really so here’s some crappy pictures my friend took with my camera. My friend really sucks at photography. It’s too bad because we saw a nice looking black GTR parked near the convenience store we were just inside. Stupid photography challenged friend.
I went to momo paradise the other night which is an all you can eat sukiyaki place. Sukiyaki is basically like this, they put a big metal pan full of a soup stock on a burner built into the table. Also placed on the table are plates of thinly sliced beef and pork, and plates of vegetables, mushrooms, etc. as well as a bowl into which you put the contents of an egg and stir it up with your chopsticks.
You let the stock come to a boil, and then start adding the slices of meat and vegetables to the stock. The meat cooks in about 30 seconds, the veges take a bit longer. You pull what you want out of the pan and dip it into the raw egg mixture, then eat it like that. Very delicious. Guess if you’re a vegetarian you can’t eat this though.
Then I had dessert with my friend. For scale, that dessert glass was about the size of a large honeydew melon or a huge cabbage. It looks a hell of a lot smaller in the picture than it was.
Nothing going on today. Had an English lesson today with my favorite student, always fun talking with him.
One of my older students quit coming to lessons a few days ago and sent me a poorly written and somewhat angry sounding email. I’m not sure if it was meant to be angry or if he was just looking up words in his dictionary and picking angry/insulting words by accident which I think is more likely. Anyway, it’s too bad I won’t be getting money from him anymore, but in all honesty I hated teaching him. He had no motivation to learn and his English just plain sucked, despite that he was always asking to move to advanced topics even when he couldn’t understand the (easy) subject I was teaching him. Bah. Can’t please some people. Need to find another student to replace him.
In other news I got another wacky business idea that I think might work out pretty decently thanks to Japan Post’s fantastic prices and speedy delivery around the world. Once it’s in swing everyone that I know that reads this blog regularly will get a full sized sample. I finally solved my dillema of what product to sell - I found a product that’s made cheaply, without much labor, does not require much storage space, is not heavy, can be shipped for under $5 anywhere in the world and can be sourced anywhere. Took damn long enough. Anyway I’ll post more on that once it’s in swing. Sales on ebay and yahoo auctions Japan start next week. I might throw some stuff up on my store as well but we’ll see.
No pictures this time. I’m considering selling my D2X and Nikon lenses because
A) The kind of photography I do is mostly long exposures of architecture, I haven’t done that much photography requiring high speed action shots. For the studio that I have set up I could just as easily use a Large Format Camera with the same lighting I have now
B) That kind of architectural/wide angle night photography is best done with a Large Format film camera or tilt shift lenses for the built in perspective correction
C) Tilt shift lenses don’t work properly with my D2X (When the perspective correction is used the lens body hits the mirror box of the camera) and are too expensive, while a Large Format Camera would cost me about $200 to buy or build including a lens, plus I already have a tripod
D) Though I -almost- got some photographs I took published in a big magazine here, I’m not making any money from that camera which is a problem considering the price I paid for it. Unfortunately wedding photography is not a big business here; if I were in Canada I’d be doing weddings 24/7 but here it’s very rare
Meh. Will think about it. If I do sell it I’ll replace it with a compact Olympus or Canon, and a large format 4×5 press camera or some other 4×5 or 8×11 camera. Great thing about Tokyo is we still have lots of very professional film labs around.
Even McDonalds is better in Japan! I got this glass for free today at McDonalds, awesome. They don’t do stuff like that anymore in Canada or the US. I’m going to go back later this week to get a blue one since my room mate recently broke 3 glasses by accident in the last few weeks, bleh. Not bad huh, pay $5 for a meal and get a pretty nice glass for free (Not plastic!)
I photoshopped one of my pics to look like it was a miniature scene. Not sure how good it looks but whatever.
More pics from Tokyo. Took these last night after a lesson. Had a bunch of lessons all in a row last night, didn’t finish till super late.
It’s not even 5:30pm yet and it’s almost pitch black out. Of course the fact the whole damn city is surrounded / covered in buildings that block out the sun at every hour except noon, but still, wtf.
In happy news the Bank of Japan decided to bail out the country by dumping the yen for other currencies. Basically this means the yen is getting weaker which means my money from abroad is getting stronger. Unfortunately I have to withdraw it all by tomorrow because my debit card for that account expires on November 1st, so I won’t be able to ride out the improving exchange rate much longer, but as it stands I’ll only lose about 20% instead of the 40% I was losing earlier this week/last week. Good! I can hardly believe I’m saying 82yen per dollar is a good rate. A year ago a dollar bought 120 yen!!
More pics from a while back at Asakusa. Just got around to post processing these. After I finish writing this post I have to email a bunch of people then I’m going out to take some more creepy night time pics of Tokyo! Believe it or not though this whole city wakes up by 5am, which is in about 30 minutes.
I went to Fujisawa in Kanagawa yesterday, that was alright. But it started raining super super hard after I came back, until about an hour ago. No big deal really, except the humidity was at something like 98% the entire time. I thought it was a typhoon maybe. Very uncomfortable to sleep in that kind of weather.
Sorry no pics. It gets dark at 5 here now whenever there are clouds out. The buildings everywhere block out the light around that time anyway.
Got another new student last week. Yay me. More cash payments.
Here’s some more pictures from around Tokyo and an awesome huge Mantis that was parked outside my window for hours. Actually it’s still there.. Funny thing about the building pictures, I ran them through perspective correction to try to imitate the kinds of lens movements possible with a large format camera. Wonder if it’s very noticeable to the untrained eye.. Sure helps to have a 12mp camera when you use that tool though.
I went out picture taking the other day with a friend and taught them how to use their new DSLR (A D80). I got to use a D80 for the first time since I sold mine and I was reminded of how much I like the shutter sound and feel on that camera. For some reason it just feels nicer than the shutter of the D2X, even though the D2X is a way better camera in most respects. I got to mess around with an 18-200mm VR lens too which was neat but I wouldn’t give up my current lens selection for one.
I also start teaching a new private (CASH!!) student today who I think chose me out of a ton of other teachers because I like photography. GOOD!
Anyway here are the pictures I took. The lighting was EXTREMELY contrasty and difficult - it’s like summer time here this week. I even managed to get quite sunburned (Now turned into a tan). I used a polarizer for a good portion of the day to try to keep the the sky’s light in check but it only helps so much. Shadows were a pain.
Trying to figure out if my telephoto lens has an element problem and needs to be serviced or if it’s just a problem the lens design has with high contrast subjects and chromatic aberration.
Left picture the blue fringe is highly visible on the high contrast letters on the guy’s shirt. Right picture is after a few seconds of photoshopping to remove the problem, which is a bit of a pain and not easily fixable for all photos. Lots of manual effort aka SKILL required which I have but don’t have the patience for.
I was supposed to go out last night to Shibuya with my friend and take tons of night pics. But she canceled again at the last minute. So no pictures. 彩子！ほら！今度絶対キャンセルしないでよ！！きい！！
In good news I beat Pony Graphics in my labor dispute, though I only got about half as much money as I was looking for. I decided to settle for it since getting more would have required more waiting, and would have also required me to jeopardize the jobs of my friends who still work at Pony which wouldn’t be too cool.
What will I do with the money.. Probably buy food and stuff. I may buy another cheap flash, some photo umbrellas and a backdrop and try to get people to start paying me for doing studio portraits and stuff, because my roommate just happens to have an Epson R2400 which is the best photo printer money can buy for doing 13″ wide prints.. I’d know, I sold the things for 2 years.. Speaking of which, if anyone needs photographs printed (Or wants prints of my photos) let me know and we can work out a good price cheaper than what the commercial shops charge! Shipping letter sized documents is super cheap from Japan.
Anyway I found a couple cheap vivitar flashes for under 5000￥ which is like 50$, maybe I can start making money at this stuff. Funnily enough one of my students is a model. Maybe she’ll do a photoshoot for my portfolio.
That’s all for now folks. @ Pony Graphics, told you I would win.
Requests were made for pictures of my long hair! Requests granted! Looks like Don King from this angle.
I spent a couple hours tonight photographing random streets at night around my apartment. When I got back I realized how boring the streets are around here. I’ve already done the “absence” mood thing so I didn’t want to do it over again. Only problem is it’s damn boring here at night. Maybe one of these days I’ll skip the last train from Shibuya or Ikebukuro and just take pictures for 3 or 4 hours until I get something interesting.
Anyway here’s a few that were slightly interesting. At one point the police came by to talk to me but when I moved my face from the camera and they saw I was a white dude they just kept on rollin.. Funny. Who wants to bet on which is faster, the grandma bike with only 1 gear or the motorized scooter with only 1 wheel?
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Here’s a couple shots of Tokyo’s infamous warp speed taxis. This isn’t a camera trick, I actually took these photos on ultra high speed film, the cabs are traveling at 20 times the speed of light. Just kidding. I failed to achieve the effect I was looking for and am left wondering why I’m getting a strange pattern on the panning photos. There may be a problem with my camera battery or the sensor that’s causing it to pulse like that on certain colors. Worst of all the pictures aren’t interesting which sucks because I spent around 20 minutes looking like an idiot to everyone walking by just trying to pan the camera with a bunch of taxis driving by.
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Here’s a pic of a white Lamborghini Gallardo I just happened to see and photograph while screwing around photographing the light-speed taxis. It’s the white car in front of the yellow cab.
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