Last week the temperature broke 40 degrees in Kumagaya. We seek weekend refuge in air-conditioning. She puts her feet up and rests. I choose the music. Christy Moore, Jonathan Richman, Belle and Sebastian, Gorecki. The cat drifts in and out of sleep, waiting for me to get out of the chair so he can nab it.
Last September we walked the length of the North Alps from Murodo to Kamikochi. This July I put up the photos.
Size is everything when it comes to mountain photos. You want them big to marvel at the vastness of the place and all the tiny details. Take the rock field on the Kamikochi side of Kurobegorodake. There are worlds in that field. Or the ridge to its right shining in the sun. You want these photos big.
(I've accidentally deleted some genuine comments when wading through a swamp of spam to get this thing back in order. Bit of a shame, but I remember what they said.)
Felt the urge to take photos yesterday for the first time in months.
Framing somewhat off.
The cat with soft porn lighting.
And a zoom lens, also with soft porn lighting.
There you go.
Rishiri Island, an island mountain in the sea off Northeast Hokkaido. Respect to the photographer, because Rishiri is deceptively difficult to photograph.
Peak photos.
Click to enlarge.
Junior Soprano and his Chinese granddaughter having their sangers on the Great Wall.
If it's photos of ducks you're after, you've come to the right place.
If my mother looked at this one, she'd say "But you left his head out."
And if Confucius didn't say "Even a swan can look bucklegged and ugly from the right angle", he should have.
One of my favourite ways of relaxing is going back through a batch of photos I've taken in the past.
Pat pre-game.
One of the Sao Paolo contingent.
A stroll in Ueno Park the next day, pondering what might have been.
Clear skies in Tokyo today after all the rain.
Rausudake with an artificially added sky. Early days with this technique, as you can see, but the possibilities here are endless. Apologies if you're a purist.
Following Steve's suggestion, how it looked before the tampering, with a completely washed out sky.
With thanks to Kurt, I've finally got around to working out how to do this. The key, for any other beginners interested, is Adjustment Layers and Layer Masks in Photoshop, and the use of the airbrush to feather. To anyone not interested, that isn't going to make much sense, but here's an example. The raw image of this photo, taken on Kitadake in July, had an almost completely washed out sky.
Spotted this Northern Fox on the way back down Rausudake.
These two brown bears had just finished feeding on salmon from the river mouth in Shiretoko.
Is this an eagle? Taken on the Okhotsk coast just south of Abashiri. These fellows are all along that coast.
I also saw a 30cm green snake (maybe a tree snake?) on the trail down Rausudake, but didn't have the presence of mind to take a photo.
Haneda Airport.
A view from an airplane.
One of Hokkaido's many seagulls.
I didn't expect to see this fellow in a pond at the grimy, overgrown Hibiya Park. This park, like many of the centre-pieces of Chiyoda Ward, could do with some upkeep.
"Beginning to cloud over" takes on real meaning at 3,000 metres.
Clouds.
And more clouds.
Watching the sun set.
Kitadake is famous for its alpine flowers.
The main highway of the South Alps.
A fat bird on the Kitadake shoulder.
A barrel of water.
An old man.
And another shot of yesterday's mountain.
Not sure whether this is Senjyogatake or Kaikomagatake, but whichever it is, it's a pretty stunning mountain.
I got very cold standing around on the exposed shoulder of Kitadake at 3,000 metres high waiting to take this picture. As I was waiting around sipping some whisky to stay warm, I thought of Mitsuaki Iwago, the famous and incredibly humble Japanese wildlife photographer, who once stood for five days in the freezing, freezing Arctic waiting for a polar bear family to come out of its winter hibernation. The footage he finally got was his reward. That level of dedication is the measure of Iwago.
Japan's highest campsite had no shortage of tents Saturday night. These were the ones that got there late and had to camp on the exposed ridge. Dangerous, I thought, but I suppose people have pitched tents in worse places.
I told Dessie I missed the low skies and wonderful sunsets common to Australia and Ireland and he stunned me with a simple, obvious answer that I had never considered. What do both countries have in common? Nothing to the west. California sunsets must be special.
Great scenes of excitement once again at the peak.
Despite all the weather warnings, the views were close to perfect.
Not quite the roof of Japan, but the second-best thing.
Another of the marshes of Oze.
The flower of the skunk cabbage.
Shining down like water.
Mount Shibutsu in the distance.
It's been another one of those nights spent watching another one of those scenes, hoping everyone you know there--extended family, friends, and family of friends--are all okay.
The red-bricked storehouse in Minato Mirai, Yokohama.
Minato Mirai from Osanbashi Pier, Yokohama. With tripod. I am now a card-carrying Oyaji.
The polar bear shakes off after a swim.
The only place I ever want to see black bears.
And some synchronized penguins.
One thing about having your own blog is you have complete editorial control. That means you can bore your readers senseless for days with your mountain photos. Especially when it's close season in the football and you refuse to indulge in aimless transfer speculation prior to the July 1 start date for signing foreign players. (Nobody mention the words beanpole or six million pounds, please.)
On a related note, I just found out my uncle, with whom I climbed Fuji in 2001, is coming back for more. He's 70 this year. It has to be Kitadake this time round.
"People who don't climb mountains--the great majority of humankind, that is to say--tend to assume that the sport is a reckless, Dionysian pursuit of ever escalating thrills. But the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies chasing a righteous fix is a fallacy, at least in the case of Everest. What I was doing up there had almost nothing in common with bungee jumping or skyriding or riding a motorcycle at 120 miles per hour.
Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became a Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any other mountain I've ever been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace."
Jon Krakaeur, Into Thin Air
Photographing photographers.
Romantic Rainbow Bridge through a polarizing filter.
Suzume.
Fountain photos all round.
Making sure the fountain rules are enforced.
Sweeping inside the fountain.
A surfer on the waveless Odaiba Beach. He's had enough.
Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said "I can resist everything except new gadgets"?
I did it folks. I upgraded my equipment.
After six months of telling myself I didn't need one, I went out and bought a digital SLR. Went to Akihabara last night after work with the intention of buying the old model Canon EOS Digital Kiss, second-hand. Came home with the new model, new. As you do.
This weekend, I'm going to sleep on a red volcano. Should give me plenty of opportunity to prove that camera doesn't matter.
Just below the peak of Tateyama, North Alps.
Mt. Shibutsu, Oze. A lovely mountain.
Looking down on the Katanokoya Hut, Kitadake, South Alps.
The sun setting over Kawaguchiko.
This old lady was very curious.
A Zen master attempts to move Mount Fuji "a little to the right."
It being Chinese New Year, this old guy finally made the long journey to Beijing to see the son or daughter who moved there years before in search of work. While in the capital, he also wanted to take in its main sight. Only his grandson was willing to do the tourist thing. Maybe. Your guess, as they say...
It was a great idea, when two of Japan's most famous living photographers, Tsuneyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama, decided to take their cameras to Shinjuku for a day last year and photograph the area that most represents the glittering and stinking half-exotic, half-mundane world of order and chaos that is hardc0re urban Japan. Araki shot in colour, Moriyama in black and white, and the photos they took that day are now being exhibited in Opera City (Japanese). I was very keen to go along.
Here's what I expected. Two brilliant photographers shooting a subject matter very familiar to me. Shinjuku is my backyard and in many ways like a second hometown. I could give guided tours of the place. I have photographed it in all its areas, time after time, always finding it a difficult essence to capture. So I was hoping for some inspiration. These two old masters would show the hapless but enthusiastic beginner clever techniques and fresh ways of looking.
And here's what they did. They sauntered from the east exit of the station down to Koma Stadium, the heartland of red light gangsterland Kabukicho, wandered around there taking photos of sleeping homeless people and startled yamamba for a while, before hitting the beer, heading off to fraternize with the local wh0res, taking their naked photos and then staggering back to the station to go home to their wives.
Or so it seems. I don't know what they did, really. I don't even know if they're married. But the middle section of the exhibition is two walls of photos of naked ladies of the water business the two old doyens seem to have met that day. They're good pictures, it must be said, and very pleasant on the eye.
And if you think Shinjuku is almost exclusively about selling sex, you'll find the chosen subject matter very faithful. It certainly does capture a journey into the seamy side of the place, which is a side that contains many fascinations. But I have to be honest: good as the nudes are, I wanted to be impressed by more than that. I suspect they've underestimated the many faces of Shinjuku, treating it almost as a cliche of itself. Seriously, they just went on the p!ss and on to see the wh0res.
More damning still is the lack of editing. I could pick out 100 shots in this exhibition that aren't as good as photos my friends take. Where was the quality control, boys? In the old chancers' defence, they might say the only way to capture Shinjuku's essence is by taking take millions and millions of photos.
Messrs. Moriyama and Araki are highly respected men of the camera. Araki's nickname is Genius, for God's sake. They're good and they know it, and so does everybody else. This also means they've nothing to lose, and unfortunately it shows.
Though I haven't followed many in the Japan weblog community to the photo-sharing social network application flickr.com (because I'm very happy and stuck in my ways with Gallery), I am starting to find its RSS feeds very enjoyable.
In the new era of tags, Flickr provides what I suppose would be called tag feeds. In other words, they provide an RSS feed for every photo taken by every Flickr member and then labelled by them with a specific tag. You can find these feeds by doing a search in Bloglines for the tag.
Take Tokyo, for example. If you add a Tokyo tag to the snap of Tokyo Tower you upload and make public on Flickr, it will be put into the Tokyo, Everyone's Tagged Photos feed, and I then get to see it through Bloglines. This means I'm getting a feed showing millions of Tokyo photos. Some are great, some shocking. Some have little to do with Tokyo. One person takes about twenty photos of her cat every day. It's a lovely cat and she photographs it well. Most take landmarks or parties in Izakaya. It's an interesting learning experience seeing the photos others take. I can't tell you how many pictures of Sensoji Temple in Asakusa I've seen in the last two months.
Yesterday I set up a hiking photo feed too. Some amazing photos on offer there. You get much fewer bad photos of mountains than you do of cities. Looking at these photos would make you want to go to the States and try the Pacific Trail.
Headed down to the Central Wholesale Fishmarket in Tsukiji early this morning with the camera. Wild place, so full of urgency. Kind of reminded me of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, except the people here are dealing in something tangible. I left Tsukiji on a great high this morning. Hard to believe this world coexists so close to the likes of Roppongi Hills. Also hard to believe I'd hadn't visited it until now.
Jean Pearce, incidentally, has a great piece on Tsukiji in More Footloose in Tokyo. Recommended reading before you make the trip. Especially interesting is the description of how this "made" (or reclaimed) land (ÃÛÃÏ¡Ëused to be a segregated colony housing Tokyo's couple of hundred foreigners away from the main population in the Meiji era, after the doors were opened to the West. A bit like the Azabu/Hiroo "foreign ghetto" of today except with fewer Porsches and more missionaries?
Photos in the gallery. Dead fish, it must be said, are very photogenic.
The provocation begins.
Early in the morning in Liverpool, we talked about photography. The lads were asking me if I "doctor" my photos after I take them, meaning by that whether I use software like Photoshop to change them after the fact.
I said I had been learning about Photoshop recently, and would like to learn to use it better.
From what I could gather, and I may well be misrepresenting them, the lads reckon use of software to change a photo after it has been taken is at worst cheating, at best not part of the creative process.
For them, the choosing of the subject is where the real art of photography lies.
I reckon they're just technophobes, myself.
I argued that the actual photograph we take when we push the shutter is not a reality, but just a representation thereof, and as such has no intrinsic value that is being sullied by later altering.
That's the crux of my argument: using photo editing software is not defacing a reality; it's part of the continued process of creating a representation.
It's just like changing words in something you write. The Beat Poets might think editing taboo, but most people know that working to get something right is not shameful.
Saying Photoshop cannot be part of the creative process of photography is equivalent to Jack Kerouac scoffing at writers who rewrite their work. It's also like saying dance music isn't real music because it isn't played with conventional instruments.
It's what you get if you cross theory born out of Beat Poet self-adoration complexes with commoner garden technophobia.
Police poster warning that Mammy Bear and Baby Bear are in the area. No mention of Goldilocks.
This is not "art." "Art" is a whole collection of pictures just like this on the 3rd floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu.
Close-ups of food open doors to new worlds of disgustingness. Korean-style octopus and noodles, in case you're asking.
A rock climber coming down Mitsutouge last Saturday.
Mitsutouge photos now in the gallery.
A traditional view of Fuji, taken from the peak of Mitsutouge.
A more honest perspective, taken from Mitsutouge village at the end of the hike.
Cherry blossoms aren't the only crowd pullers in Tokyo. The multitudes they flocked in throngs to the capital's Kameido area today for a festival in a temple reknowned for its wisteria.
The women came to see the flowers, the men to shoot them. They were armed for this mission with what must be described as big motherfucking cameras.
While the wisteria were very nice, I thought the crowds they drew were disproportionate to their beauty, not to mention my comfort.
I took the opportunity to take some photos of Tokyo's older folks and their hats. As I was leaving, one old guy came up to me, looked me in the eye and said "Good Sunday" emphatically in English. Then he and his wife laughed and went on their way.
Click on Continue Reading to see those who came and the flowers they came to see.
