So, for the final part of my 1 year later series marking 1 year since I left Japan after my 10 stretch….
Pictures of as many of the people who made it fun/interesting/bearable/possible as I can find.
Whether they were close friends or merely acquaintances, whether we are still friends or not, all of these people (and more) touched my life for good in some way.
Thank you.
If there are people missing, I’m sorry (really sorry!)….I probably just couldn’t find a decent picture (or any picture!) of you and for that, I apologize.
(Also I just let the order fall as it may so no intended order just FYI)
Behold, what I left behind when I absconded, my Tokyo peeps…..
(published all over the world including CNN, The BBC, The Guardian, La Revue, Der Spiegel, GUP magazine and countless blogs)
It wasn’t long after first arriving in Japan I started noticing people asleep on the streets.
As an insomniac I have always been very interested in sleep and coming from a country where if you slept on the street you would likely wake up without your wallet and your shoes (and probably far worse), I was fascinated.
What started out as a very personal exploration of my own relationship with sleep turned into a commentary on overwork and alcohol abuse in Japanese society.
The full series can be viewed on my main site HERE and the 10 new, mostly never before seen photographs below….
May I present a completely new series “I keep waving at the taxis; they keep turning their lights off” a companion to my “Let The Poets Cry Themselves To Sleep” series which I am also posting new photos from.
A road close to my old apartment that ran along one side of a lovely park was used by taxi drivers to park up between their obviously long shifts, they would use the public toilet, watch baseball games in the park, eat and day or night sleep in their cabs. I would walk past them every day and it would always make me feel a little sad to see these mostly older men eating their unhealthy convenience store cup noodles and grabbing an uncomfortable little sleep in their taxis.
Like the “Let The Poets” series it is intended as a comment on Japanese societies unhealthy and frankly terrifying over dedication to work at the expense of everything else.
On a windy day last week I went to my local park to do some test shooting with my new A7SII in 120fps slow motion mode.
I shot handheld with Picture Profile off and the Neutral setting with auto white balance. I used a Pentax 35-70mm K-mount lens on a Fotoga adapter.
The footage was conformed to 24p in Premiere, black and white levels adjusted, some saturation and a touch of sharpening added.
My take aways from this are:
It looks pretty damn good.
120fps is not really slow enough for this kind of stuff, it looks great for people but the leaves were moving so fast in the wind that 240 or 480fps would look better.
I over exposed quite a few of the shots. I didn’t use an ND filter which I really should have. No built in ND’s is the A7SII’s biggest downside IMHO, well ok that and no XLR audio inputs unless you buy the expensive XLR-K2M.
Steady shot is pretty impressive but even with it this would have been better with a tripod, I was getting blown around by the wind. Luckily slow motion makes it look ok.
Even in this mode the footage is head and shoulders above 24p footage out of my trusty old 5DmkII. There is definitely a skin tone advantage to the 5D (if properly white balanced) but that obviously wasn’t apparent in this case.
My old Pentax K-mount lenses are surprisingly good. The 35-70 is prone to a little flaring but hey that’s cool right?
The scenes that started in Meiji park around midday yesterday and continued throught the day as a 50,000 people strong crowd marched through the streets of Tokyo to protest Nuclear power are quite simply the most impressive thing I have ever seen in Japan.
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