Walk in the Park

Today: no words, just photos.

Last day in Tokyo

Back in July I spent a week in Tokyo. On my last day, I met up with my buddy Steve who lives near Mt. Fuji. Steve showed me around Shinjuku, Akibahara, and some other neighborhoods. We went to a festival for some fireworks and were rained on. Some rando put their fingers on my 31mm FA Limited's lens on accident. I ate the most incredible street food and octopus I've ever tried.


Before Steve arrived, I had about an hour to ram around Shinjuku and stumble into a Nikon shop. It was pretty great as I'd never seen one of the Canon f0.95 "Dream Lens" lenses before. After Steve arrived, he showed me all the great camera stores in Shunjuku. I wish I had bought some cameras. I wanted to but, for some reason, decided against it. Yes. Worst decision of the trip.


At Shinjuku Station, they had some mascots.


And somewhere in Tokyo this Panda waited for its owner to leave a store.


After some hours, we ended up at a festival. I forget what for, but there were fireworks over the river, too. A good portion of the people dressed in traditional Japanese garments.


Tradition mixed with modernity.


Steve and I were not the only photographers there. This girl from Hong Kong had a Holga.


Steve and I seemed, for a while, to be the only people NOT shooting medium format. I really liked this guy's Bronica. Beautiful camera.


And a giant lantern. I could have easily gone through two more rolls of film at the festival but everyone kept asking me to take their photos. Literally, they left everyone around me alone. Steve, who speaks Japanese, said someone said they thought I was a professional. I guess a lot of people heard that.


After deciding to take photos of things other than other people with their cameras, Steve and I were herded by a cop with a megaphone almost as big as him. It's pretty great.


And we stopped for octopus. Totally worth the 15-minute wait. I wanted more. I want to fly back to Tokyo and walk around until I find this place and have more.


Unfortunately, I don't have any fireworks photos because it rained. Hard. It was all Steve and I could do to keep our gear from getting wet. In the subway, we watched a few trains leave to get shots of how insanely crowded they were.


The cops tolerated us. Mostly.

F3 Delivers Again

My Nikon F3 has become one of the three most important cameras in my collection, behind my K1000 -- the first SLR I ever owned -- and my Pentax K-7. In fact, I like my F3 so much that I've decided to get a second DSLR this year, a Nikon D5100 or D300 (The jury is still out on whether I want to use my NAI lenses on a DSLR.) That said, the F# does have one small issue -- the LCD in the viewfinder is dead so I never know what shutter speed I'm shooting, just the aperture. This was also my first outing with Efke 35mm film. Currently, my favorite film lineup goes a bit like this in 35mm:

1- Efke 100 ISO
2- Pan-x 125 ISO
3- TMax 400 ISO
4- Everything else.

That will change as I use different films. For instance, I want to use Adox in 35mm as well as Fuji Acros. And I suspect that with the right conditions Ilford 50 ISO would be a very enjoyable film to shoot. As for today's photos, I hope that you'll be plenty pleased. This roll returned some of the best results I've gotten this year. The F3 tends to do that.


f3.5. A long exposure, though. It was somewhat overcast at the beginning of my walk, and drizzly.


f11. A fountain in a courtyard area.


f22. I wonder what the heck that is.


f11. Well that helps a little. Actually, no it doesn't. I was just lying there.


f5.6 Oh, of course. Those were interior shots of the sculpture Icoaspirale. Why didn't I guess that the first time?

This sculpture falls soundly into the "I don't get it, but I really like it" category. Were the inside inaccessible, it would be a much different piece and much weaker for it.


f8. A seagull searching for french fries.


f11. Another seagull searching for french fries. Seagulls, I may have mentioned before, are disease bags. But they're okay in my book because they like fries.


f16. Let's just appreciate this image a moment. It's not going to win any prizes, nor will anyone ever hang it on a gallery wall. But it conveys the Efke film's quality in a clear, and appreciable way. When I upload images to my holding pen in Picasa, I shrink them to 1000 pixels wide by about 630 tall (depending on the image.) As a baseline, the longest dimension is 1000 pixels. This makes the images between .6 and .8 megapixels. I also compress them to 10, which makes them all about 150KB. Posted on this page, they're further reduced to 550 pixels wide. All that resizing and downgrading and this image has not gained grain or noise, lost meaningful image quality, nor developed strange jpeg artifacts. A lot of the credit rests with the film, and you can see from the water and the first boats that this film records great detail. In addition, the tonal range here is in balance in a way that would make histogram peepers drool. This film is an amazing film. If you ever shoot film, buy one roll of this and try it. This was $6 for 36 exposures. I actually got 28 on the roll. With the right camera, you may get 39 or 40. An amazing number of photos and only $6 for the roll, or so. Just a superb film. I hope it never goes out of production.