Ragu

roots and dried up, fallen leaves in a little park by nishi nippori station

some fuckin guy in the traffic corner mirror, don't know what his whole deal is

the self-deprecating humor of the elite on a chalkboard in nishi nippori station. oh my god he admit it.

going up a hill around nishi nippori station

february, fuji 400 or maybe portra 400
nishinippori area
what the hell do you do in one of the biggest cities on earth when you're alone for the day?
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

a train viewed through chain links heading towards mabashi station at golden hour

a rusted old walkway overpass over the tracks

salon masako, like my wife!! :)

they left the lights on for us at the mormon church

february, fuji 400
kitamatsudo station > mabashi station
comin' home to you
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

screenshot from some comparison video showing the foyer in the pc version of resident evil with an ai upscale pack for the backgrounds

what in the name of god is going on with these shadows

"you can use the ai upscale pack and it looks really good"

been feeling pretty discouraged lately, partly due to the whole being separated from the wife by an ocean, partly due to a bunch of rolls i got back being vignetted and underexposed to shit thanks to my pentax mx apparently fucking up both mechanically and electrically.

trees bordering several towers in the background

towers behind a walkway overpass, windows and slopes giving the architecture a very bumpy sort of texture

on a raised platform, a number of zigzagging glass structures with towers behind, glass reflecting buildings on the opposite side

busy midday crosswalk outside shinjuku station, anime girl sticker on a pole to the right

february, fuji 400 (i think)
shinjuku
shapes in shinjuku
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

izakaya iitomo, an old residential izakaya i walk past any time i'm walking to the station. like a good friend, iitomo is always there to greet me

the mormon church across the street towering over the massage parlor

rows of bikes parked by the station

a plastic palm tree occluding the rooftop sign for hotel hibiscus, shot from a low angle. the love hotel i orient myself by.

february, kodacolor 100
matsudo
on the way to the station
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

i am beside myself in anticipation waiting for this pile to get back from the lab. how many more night shots did fuck up the focus on at f1.4??? god i can't wait
#filmphitography

the clock in osaka station with windows above crisscrossed by metal beams

the hustle and bustle of the crowd on the ground level with one fella standing stock still in the middle

geometric bars underneath a spiral staircase

old-fashioned roof tiles with a power pole above them and a glass tower behind them, another building on the opposite side reflected in the glass

february, kodacolor 100
osaka station
taking in some details
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

another view of tsutenkaku in center frame with crowds in the foreground

the rail overpasses curve in a way that feels like you're looking in a fisheye lens. getting some real king of fighters vibes for some reason, i say, totally aware that this was where they made king of fighters

a typically japanese massively overloaded electrical pole

vines growing on a white pipe before a canal with an overpass running atop it

february, porta 400/fuji 400
osaka
assorted nonsense from the first day
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

driving the bear car on the zoo kart track at tokyo dome city

your uber is here

i feel like there's this uncomfortably grotesque sensuality to a lot of the box art for old european microcomputer games, maybe it's that subtle layer of shine on the guy

friend, i love that you have such passion for Fat Worm Blows A Sparky on the zx spectrum, but alas, i was born in the wrong time, on the wrong continent, so this is where we must part ways.

yeah whatever value there is in trying to put yourself in the headspace to understand something you lack that innate context for has to be balanced with our limited time on this earth and i'm increasingly feeling like doing that for stupid ass old games is very much not worth it on balance.

"let's try this perfect dark recompilation" i say, and within 20 minutes feel such a profound sense of compassion and empathy for the children who didn't have a pentium growing up

whenever i try to get into the n64 i just end up playing mario 64 or zelda again. i will probably try again at some point but i ought to admit that my window for being able to appreciate the n64 to anywhere remotely near the degree that the people who grew up with it do has probably passed

i did, in fact, know that it was not osaka castle on top of that building

thanks, i got these scanned and inverted by a lab in tokyo (yellow jacket in sendagi), and i'm hoping to reverse engineer their process when i get the negs scanned here because i really like their colors too

"oh, it's osaka castle!"

a crane that was apparently modeling for the visitors outside the art museum

decoration on the tiles atop a wall

fella making kushikatsu at kushikatsu daruma. damn that depth of field is thin as fuck huh

february, portra 400/fuji 400
osaka
"it's osaka castle!" i exclaim, as a couple of locals do a double take at the extremely stupid tourist
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

been home for two hours, already sick of my own company

I'm just salty right now, it's a beautiful place but very much not beautiful between roughly mid-november to april. also not really any grizzly bears but a lot of urban deer

it would be one thing to have to leave some of the most interesting places on the planet to return to fucking kelowna, but also i have to do it alone, without my wife. a punch in the gut and a kick in the balls.

i definitely don't do my best work while being a tourist with my wife, but on the flip side i get to be a tourist with my wife and not just an island of generalized anxiety thrashing about in a sea of strangers trying desperately to Art

the crowded shopping street with tsutenkaku in the center, power wires seem to be framing tsutenkaku

masako in the crowds on the shopping street

more streets around tsutenkaku on a longer focal lengths where all the signs look nearly flattened together

tsutenkaku with the osaka shinsekai sign from a low amgle

february, fuji 400
osaka, shinsekai area
after all, we're tourists
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

the pentax f1.4 50mm is rock fucking solid though, insane lens, so happy i went for it.

the tamron zoom lens i was using has some really bad vignetting at the short focal lengths and it seems to throw off the in-camera metering pretty badly, so a lot of my shots from the train and from osaka were vignetted and underexposed to shit. 残念〜

maybe the best album cover of all time

mt. fuji, an industrial area in the foreground, blue skies and thin wispy clouds.

a construction site with morning sun breaking through the clouds

managed to get this shot just as the shinkansen arrived, honestly pretty shocked i managed to freeze it like that

snowy field somewhere around kyoto

february, portra 400/fuji 400
tokyo station/en route to shin-osaka station
densha de go
#photography #filmphotography #35mm

didn't pick up any games at the book off like my blood was screaming for me to do but couldn't resist these

the power line-strung street my in-laws' house is on at the golden hour with a wide, clear blue sky.

street by my in-laws' house, which I can always remember by the snack bar tanpopo and the 7-11. I tried to make my wife watch tanpopo but she didn't get it btw.

the roofs on a beautiful morning, with the spire of the mormon church in the distance. a little bit of snow is still on the rooftops

the street at sunset with very strong halos around the headlights and street lamps

february, fuji 400/portra 400
matsudo, chiba
my other home
#photography #35mm #filmphotography