Concluding Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4 of a recent photographic trip to Tokyo, Japan.
I visited the 21_21 Design Sight museum this morning, and was lucky to catch The Outline, an exhibit about the work of product designer Naoto Fukasawa. I’m a fan of his work and really enjoyed looking at the flowing, organic shapes of his designs.
I love Tadao Ando’s architecture as well, and looking at the 21_21 museum he designed, I thought it would be a lovely thing to shoot in the evening light, but alas I was there at noon and nothing worked. It wasn’t all wasted though, as I managed to catch these autumn leaves behind the museum, my first in Tokyo. Even though I visited Tokyo in late November and everyone was telling me how beautiful the autumn leaves were going to be, I hardly saw any (the Japanese were also telling me how unusual it was raining so often – global warming, I’m looking at you).
Continuing Parts 1, 2 & 3 of a recent photographic trip to Tokyo, Japan.
A friend brought me to Meiji Shrine, where I was very lucky to witness a traditional Japanese wedding. I was also very lucky to borrow her lens, the EXIF data says this shot was taken at 300mm and I could never have pulled it off with the 7D kit lens. Japanese weddings seemed to be very somber; they were posing very seriously for their group photograph and I had to wait just to see the bride smile.
Another stroke of luck; I happened to be in Japan right in time for the ‘7-5-3′ Festival, something I’d never even heard of before. My friend explained to me that it was a annual festival where parents will dress up their 3 and 7 year-old girls, and 3 and 5 year-old boys, in traditional kimono and bring them to the shrines for prayers, which meant lots of cute pictures.
Back in August of 2009 I wrote that I wanted to eat better; that inspired by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage I wanted to eat foods that were as real and unprocessed as possible.
I think I may just have found a mother-lode today.
Burger Bench & Bar, found on the first floor of Orchard Cineleisure, is a fast food burger joint quite unlike any other. According to them, their burger patties ‘are always oddly shaped’ because they’re hand-made, and they believe that ‘fast food does not have to be processed by machines or artificially flavored.’
Unprocessed, hand-made food coming in the shape of a burger – one of my favorite foods ever – I am so in. And, I am lucky to report, the most important part didn’t disappoint; I had the mushroom beef burger and it was delicious.
Having some fun looking through what I wrote in 21 for the year of 2009. There aren’t a lot of posts, 44 in total for the entire 12 months (posting frequency was an issue, heh) but there are some in here that I’m pretty happy with.
Traces of Life Coaches Blog remained, with personal growth posts like The 3 Decluttering Boxes in January. I ventured into more poetic and personal writing like East Coast Night in February, which was something I wanted to do more of. I’m proud of the Martial Arts is Dealing with Self-Defense Failure post I published in March, I spent a lot of time making it as good as I could and it encapsulates a lot of what I think about martial arts and self-defense training today.
My favorite blogs of 2009; the signals amongst the noise that taught me new things, made me think different, and made me want to write better.
To me, Merlin Mann is the sanest voice in all of productivity blogging (well, most times). He pointed out that if you’re spending a lot of time reading productivity blogs about how to be more productive, you really just need to get your ass back to work. Amen. I love this man’s honesty and the way he writes; funny, conversational and chocked full of thought.
Try Real Advice Hurts, The Problem with “Feeling Creative”, and NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning. If you have 37 minutes and 22 seconds, watch Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now). Long, but awesome.
I’ve been writing here in 21 for about a year before I discovered a direction I’m comfortable with going for the next year or so, and that’s about living the creative life.
It seems obvious in retrospect – I’m a full-time writer who’s also been a full-time 3D artist, who studied digital media design in school and loves creative arts like graphic design and photography. Big duh.
But I always thought of them as separate things (well, they are). Subdued by the belief that only people who specialize are serious professionals, I thought of myself as a wannabe Jack-of-all-trades goofball, instead of realizing that the one denominator that links all of them up is the act of creativity.
Continuing from Parts 1 & 2 of my recent photographic trip to Tokyo, Japan, where I continue my exploration of street photography.
After grabbing a quick breakfast at the convenience store right next to this junction, I hung around while waiting for a call. I noticed the light was lovely that morning, took out my camera and started shooting. There’s something I like about this one. Makes me think of my own solitary early morning commutes to work, feeling like the weight of the day ahead was already upon me even before I’d started.
This was shot at another crossroads, about half an hour later at Omotesando Street. I spotted this beautiful mother and daughter pair from across the road and snapped a few photos, feeling again that mixture of excitement at getting a good shot and nervousness at disturbing someone else’s privacy.
Continuing from Part 1 of my recent photographic trip to Tokyo, Japan.
The one day we went out of the city was the one day it kept drizzling. Instead of being disappointed though, I wondered if I could take advantage of the rainy weather. Sure enough, I realized that there were many beautiful colors and patterns in the umbrellas that people were carrying. In this shot, I love how the color of the umbrella complements the color of the temple in the background.
There was a price to shooting in the rain though. I realized very soon that I couldn’t shoot holding both an umbrella and a Canon 7D DSLR at the same time, so I abandoned the umbrella and walked around in the drizzle, tucking the camera into my jacket whenever I wasn’t shooting. Although it got really cold with the rain and the wind (around 10 degrees Celsius), I was more worried about the rain getting onto my DSLR than getting onto me! The Canon people assured me that the 7D was weather-proof, but I kept wiping raindrops off as fast as I could.
