Japan: a third year in photos

It’s taken a couple of months to get all my photos together, but I’ve finally chosen my favorites from my third year of living in Japan. It’s been another eventful year, personally and proffessionaly. I’ve moved on to a different job, seen friends leave Japan, been travelling, and finally booked a plane ticket to visit home this Christmas. It’s also been a big year for taking photos. I’ve started trying to sell prints, won an award, and begun developing my own rolls of film. It was also a year where I shot less film than previously. Any fellow film shooters will know how much more expensive it’s become recently. It’s been a lot harder to shoot film this year, and there were some months where I didn’t shoot anything at all. But less on what I didn’t shoot, and more on what I did. Here’s the photos.

I rarely see graffiti in Japan, or around Tokyo more specifically. There are some places, Shibuya for instance, where it’s more common. But it isn’t commonplace. When I do, it can often be quite interesting. For example this bowl of noodles.

I made a concious effort this part year to shoot more portrait orientated photos. I realised I was become a little bored with shooting so much landscape and my photos were becoming a little stale. Shooting more portrait helped me renew my efforts to improve framing and find more interesting subjects.

A couple of times this year I put my cameras into panorama mode by accident and shot a few photos like the one below. Usually they just look a bit weird. But a couple work out well. I think the one below works well because the extra width complements the length of the platform and the empty space besides the chairs.

In January I went on a trip to Hiroshima. It was a place I wanted to visit for a while, years in fact. Mainly to see the Hiroshima Pease Momorial. I don’t feel my words or my pictures could ever do it justice. And if you ever have the opportunity, I reccomend visiting.

I spent some time this year going to some of the sights and places I had somehow not gotten around to visiting in the two previous years. One of such places was Senso-ji, the iconic Temple in Asakusa. It was crowded but a very enjoyable place what made for some great photos.

At the start of the year I shot a little black and white film. By the end of this year I’m shooting only black and white. But more on that later.

One of the best trips I took this year was to Oshima Island, the largest of the Izu islands located south of Tokyo bay. I went alone, taking a ferry overnight that arrived before six a.m. After some breakfast from the only open store I could find, I walked to the top of Oshima’s volcano, Mt. Mihara. It was a long walk to the top, about 5 hours or so. The route itself was a little scary at times, not due to the height of the mountain, but infact becasue of the huge trucks that would fly past me every few minutes going either up or down the main road. I’m sure they weren’t used to that many people walking up the side of the road to the top of an actvie volcano in the middle of January, but I’m also sure there were speed limits not being followed. The volcano itself was stunning. The rocks along the path up were so oddly shaped and deeply black. Huge amounts of old erruption debris around each face of the mountain. It was beautiful and strange. I only saw a few people also climbing up the mountain from very far away. It was a wonderful experience and stunning landscape to shoot.

I was lucky enough to visit Disney Sea, one of Japan’s two Disney locations. There was another volcano there, but it was merely a facade.

I have continued to develop my love for the Japanese sport of Sumo. It is by far one of the most interesting and entertaining things I have seen here. With my Canon EOS55 and it’s two zoom lenses I was able to take much better photos of the action when watching one of the tournaments in Tokyo in May this year.

In the spring I went to Ibaraki to visit Hitachi Seaside Park. It’s a major tourist attraction at multiple times of year, with many travelling to see its rolling hillsides blanketed in different seasonal flowers. In May it was a covering of wonderful light blue Nemophila flowers. The weather on the day was equally beautiful, and I took some of my favourite photos of the entire year. One of them was so good to the eyes of some that I won an award for it. I was one of five winners of the Japan Travel Gallery 2022 Contest and a high quality print of my photo was shown online and in-person at the 2022 Tokyo Camera Club Exhibition in Shibuya. It feels surreal to say that even now. It is without a doubt my proudest photography moment so far, and it is the photo below.

The photo below is one I cannot take credit for, but it is one I feel like sharing nonetheless. It was taken in the first minutes of my 24th birthday, by Odelya Rapoport.

This year I moved jobs, from one teaching job to another. Leaving my first job here was a difficult personal decision. But a necassary one. It meant leaving students I had taught for over a year and a set of colleagues I had grown close to. Most closely of all was my old fellow teacher and friend David, who returned to his home of South Africa. We were able to hang out together one last time before he left.

As the summer ended this year I realised I was shooting less film than ever before, and the ever-mounting price of shooting, developing, and scanning the film was a significant part of the reasons why. Film stores, for all the good they do, are not becoming any cheaper. I decided to invest in and start developing my film to try and decrease the cost in the long term. It has been a difficult process, involving much trial and error. After a few tries though I’ve managed to get some decent and consistent results. I’m still taking my developed rolls to the film store to get them scanned, but the cost of each roll after shooting has more than halved. The next step is to eventually get a decent scanner for a reasonable price and carry out the whole process from shooting to developing to scanning.

These are shots from my first self-developed roll. The results are not great, but they are something. And that’s what matters.

These are from my second roll. The results were quite a bit better, but I still failed to rinse the chemicals off properly at the end, resulting in some splotchiness and smudging.

Below is from my third go at self-developing. I must give credit where it is due to Louisa Whitford, who a helped me in the process of developing this roll with much better results that the previous two.

My last roll of the year was shot at a train museum in Saitama. I have become quite interested in trains since moving to Japan, mainly because of just how excellent they are here.

That is more or less it for my photos from this past year in Japan. It has been another interesting year, and one that has frankly flown by. With regard to photography, it’s been a challenging one. I’ve learned new skills and developed my goals for film shooting. By this time next year, I hope to have developed far more film, perhaps even colour film too. And if possible I would like to begin scanning my developed rolls personally, so I can present picures that from start to finish, are of my own making. That’s for next year, though.