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.

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.