Harajuku: Pink Eye

I took this shot right before leaving for the States this summer and I've been sitting on it. As you can see, this girl whom I saw in Harajuku, is wearing pink color eye contacts...not a strange occurence in Harajuku. She was posing for a local magazine that highlights the fashion and trends of the Harajuku style. So like the hack that I am I stood behind the photographer (as did a few others) and snapped a few pictures.

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Harajuku: Peacock Feathers

This girl is really fascinating to me. She is obviously really into the Harajuku goth/moulin rouge dress up scene and she is Japanese, but she has these really pretty green/gray eyes...much lighter than the typical. She wasn't too interested in posing for anyone. She was sitting around a larger photography crew and was turning slightly away from us amateur hacks...but only slightly.

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Harajuku: Little Bo Peep

I found this girl hanging out with the "Free Hugs" people - a group of people who do just that, stand around offering to give free hugs to people. She was quiet and shy, but nice enough to pose for a picture. Check the main website for pictures of this girl. She's in full pink Little Bo Peep regalia. No pink sheep following her around, however.

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Harajuku: Bandaged Beauty

Harajuku is a funky part of town not too far from where I live. Young kids, mostly girls, gather on Sunday afternoons in costumes that represent everything from gothic-inspired, anime, Little Bo Peep, Lolita and everything in between. It's a great site to behold.

This girl here has dreadlocks, tattoos and bandages across her face. A very odd exterior, but soft features nevertheless.

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Dragonfly

This picture was taken on the same day as this picture of a drop of water, and this other picture of a drop of water. I was in the Imperial Palace gardens shooting for a good part of the morning on an extended business trip to Tokyo in October 2007. This dragonfly was just hanging out on this hedge and didn't seem to mind that I was following, watching, and shooting him. It was really cool. He was really big!

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Yet another water drop

You might think that I'm obsessed with water droplets, what with that other two shots of water drops that I've uploaded to the photo blog. Yes, you're right. But I couldn't help myself with my macro lens. It really does make it so easy to get up close to clearly see things like a drop of water. Anyway, the depth of field and the focus is the hardest part, of course. If you don't have a steady hand...which I don't...then it could make taking shots really hard.

Anyway, this time this photo was taken in Tokyo. It wasn't in a very peaceful place at all. It was along the side of the road on my way to the Imperial Palace...where I took this shot. It had rained the night before and despite the throng of pedestrians and the rumbling of traffic behind me, I was able to snap this shot. I promise this will be my last water droplet shot for a while...until the next time, right? This shot happens to be my background on my work laptop.

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The Big Buddha

On a recent trip to Kamakura, there stands what many consider to the be oldest outdoor statue of buddha in the world. Now this is a bit controversial, because I think every country boasts one of these. And until a few hundred years ago, it was an indoor statue. It would have stayed that way until some pesky typhoon came and knocked the enclosure over, leaving buddha exposed.

Anyway, this is kind of a cool place to come visit. I like this picture as I turned it into a black and white shot and blew out the white and darkened the blacks and grays. It gives it sort of a gritty feel.

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Asakusa Shrine

On one of our outings, we went to Asakusa Shrine here in Tokyo. I found myself having a hard time shooting because there were so many people and ultimately I couldn't get a good shot without people in the way. I sort of gave in and shot anyway.

I turned this shot into black and white and tried to darken the photograph a bit to lessen the prominence of the people. And as I have done a lot, I colorized the middle lantern.

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Kamakura Umbrella

This shot is obviously of a Japanese umbrella, taken at a rest stop at a hillside shrine in Kamakura, a resort town along coastal Japan. This also is one of Japan's most culturally significat cities.

I decided to shoot this shot because I saw someone else, who didn't speak English and I don't think spoke Japanese, was crouching down taking this picture. Because I'm a total hack and not below copying other people's work, I thought there must be some merit in snapping this...and I think there was.

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Tokyo Tower from Roppongi Hills

Roppongi Hills is a newish development that has a 52 story building - rather rare in earthquake prone Japan - with a city-view observatory. This has a wonderful view of Tokyo from an almost 360 degree view. Here is a shot of Tokyo Tower looking north and east.

I'm not sure how I feel about this shot. I think I like the idea of it and the ideal of what this shot could become. The execution I think is lacking. For one I was standing a few feet back from the glass, in which you can see faint reflections of people standing. That's too bad.

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Four

There is a place in Tokyo called Roppongi which I guess could be called the entertainment capital of Tokyo, especially for foreigners. In reality there are different "entertainment capitals" depending on your demographic. Anyway, On the back side of a large shopping, movie, restaurant complex is this cool lighted wall of glass with numbers spaced every few yards.

Anthon was running around wildly and we were having family night out so I didn't get to spend too much time shooting. I waited for a group of people walking in front of me to get the contrast of darkened, shadowy profiles of people in front of the large number four.

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Tokyo Mosque

With our move to Japan we didn't expect to get a view of a mosque. In fact, I didn't even know there was a mosque. But it has a prominent fixture in our home as we can see it from any room on the western side of our apartment. It's particularly beautiful in the evening and the sun sets behind it.

This shot was taken on one of our first nights here in our new place in Tokyo.

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Green apple

When I come to Japan on business, I get to stay at The Peninsula Hotel, an upscale hotel that just opened up in Tokyo in September. One of the great aspects about the service at this hotel is that the staff brings to your room two servings of a really great fruit each and every day. If you don't eat it, they bring in new fruit. I've had huge grapes, kiwi fruit, clementines, Japanese pears, etc. Over the weekend they brought me a couple of green apples, which became the subject of this picture.

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A drop of water

I actually took this shot today. I'm on an extended business trip to Japan and had the entire day free on Saturday. I lugged all of my photographic equipment all the way to Japan for just such an occassion.

It has rained the night before I took this shot and that meant plenty of opportunities to take pictures of leaves with little beads of water on them. I've never successfully shot one, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one. maybe it's the closest one I've taken to being remotely shaprly in-focus. This was taken inside the public gardens of the Imperial Palace. I took a lot of time looking for shots - nearly two hours. I had my iPod on and I tuned out the world while taking pictures. A very good day.

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Indian Bricks

This is just a shot of a pile of bricks at a roadside stop in India between New Delhi and Agra. I had just arrived in India the night before with my business school class and we had a day of leisure before we started our company visits. Talk about overstimulation! We couldn't keep our eyes off of the road...and I guess it's ironic that of all the pictures I took on the road to the Taj Mahal, the one that interests me most isn't shots of camels walking on the road or snake charmers...but a plain old pile of bricks.

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Shibuya at Night

I was in Japan a few weeks ago and I spent some time after work one night in the Shibuya area of Tokyo. Shibuya is known for being the hang out for the young. This shot is taking from Hachiko Square, near the main exit to the train and subway lines and the main entry point into the shops, restaurants and other nightlife of Shibuya.

The picture taken below is a panorama compiled from four individual shots I took with my Nikon. I then stitched the photos together using a really nice piece of free software called, Autostitch. All you need to do is take a number of pictures in succession with some overlapping scenes and then drop them into the program and after a while a panorama will appear.

Over the next few months, I will be spending a lot more time in Japan for work. I am taking my camera each time so that I can take more panoramas of places like the Imperial Palace and the Ginza area, etc.

A shot like this really needs to be seen in a much larger size. Download the full photograph by clicking on the image below.

Salvaging a Bad Day

I moved to Tokyo, Japan in September of 2000 for a 10 month assignment with work. My previous experience with being in Tokyo was as an intern in 1998 and I lived in the middle of nowhere and had no money to explore. So I was eager to get out of the city this time around.

2 hours by train outside of Tokyo is a place called Nikko, an alpine get-away that used to be a retreate for the Shogun rulers of Japan in the 1600's. It's full of temples and is one of the neatest places in all of Japan.

Well, on my trip up to Nikko, it was raining and it was crowded and it was a miserable experience. I had wanted to visit Lake Chuzenji, pictured below, but all I could see of the lake was this bridge. I couldn't even see a huge waterfall nearby. I could only hear it and feel the mist. The fog was so thick I couldn't even see the stupid waterfall.

I like this picture becuase it's simple and it's bleak...kind of like my day. If the fog were any thicker and the bridge any longer I would half expect the bridge to just vanish like those baseball players when they walked in the corn in the movie "Field of Dreams." The other reason why I like this picture is because it was one of the first few sets of pictures I took with my first digital camera. It was a 1.3 megapixel camera from Olympus. The thing took a few seconds to capture an image and a few more seconds to recover so you could take another image. In hindsight, the image quality wasn't anywhere a film camera, but the "cool" factor was certainly high.

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Within the Temples of Angkor Wat

I never did the backpacking-through-Europe thing before I started my career. And to some extent I always regretted it. So, when I moved with my company to Japan, I used my location as a launching pad for travel to interesting parts of Asia.

This photo was taken in Cambodia seeing what I think is one of the most awesome sights in the world, Angkor Wat. This photo could have been taken anywhere in the world, but trust me on this, it was taken in Cambodia. I liked seeing the sun pouring in on this large wooden support used to prop up the heavy cut-stones that are caving in. In fact Angkor is a city full of temples that are being destroyed by nature. It's an amazing place to see giant trees whose root systems are growing and enveloping walls. It's really a sublime place.

This shot does it for me only because of the natural framing of the darkened walls in the foreground set against a nicely positioned wooden support set at a slight angle.

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