Walking - Spring 2023

 

There's something quite appealing about side streets like this.  I was thinking about why that is and it occurs to me that the major factor may well be that it's an area without fire-breathing machinery poisoning the air, making noise, and endangering the lives of pedestrians.  That's a huge attraction.  In that respect especially, how nice the city must have been before the advent of the automobile!

Narrow streets and one, two or three story buildings... and even a tree.  The trend is towards making ever more tower buildings (including many vertical gated communities) and I wouldn't mind living up in the sky myself, but the more towers there are, the less friendly the streets become.

Glassed in waiting areas - nice when it's very hot or very cold - but otherwise I prefer to be out in the open.

It wasn't until I looked at this picture on my computer monitor that I noticed the destination of the bus.  I love taking pictures, but there is kind of an ironic element to photography in that while recording images to be viewed in the future, you miss out on the present....

Heading for the long covered shopping mall 阿佐ヶ谷パールセンター。 I had been there before, doing basically the same thing - walking down the street for a while and noting how long it is.

A large bicycle parking lot - with fairly elaborate entrance gates.

A fairly magical twilight moment.  This particularly area didn't appear to be overrun with atmosphere-destroying tourists and so felt more real and relaxed.

These streets aren't blocked off to fire-breathing machinery, but are generally just used by pedestrians.  It's nice to be able to walk about with only other people and not have to watch out for large machinery.

Asagaya Station

Koenji Station

Nakano Station

中野サンプラザ コンサート後

Quick Office

令和五年 - 仲野

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/ - lookback1997.blogspot.jp/

Stepping Out Again

Visually time traveling and looking at things mainly from a visual perspective (disregarding the content), things look interesting in different ways.  Modern scenes (from the standpoint of 2023/05) often have a sleek polished element to them.  Part of that is simply the color of the lighting.  With white and blue lighting, things seem sleek and modern?  That's what I'm thinking as I look at the above photo in any case.

Aside from the lighting issue I mention above, this photo has many elements that have carried forward over the decades.  One of many changes from past decades is tourism.  Japan has long been a popular tourist destination, but in decades past, tourists didn't have satellite navigation and micro-slab computers for translating the language, and so didn't dive into back streets popular with the locals so much.  Walking around in Nakano about a week ago, there were quite a few tourists there.

The people in a given area generate much of the atmosphere of the place, which is why a given place will have a different atmosphere just through time, even with the same age of locals there, since each new generation of young people is composed of, after all, different people, and different people generate different atmospheres.  From generation to generation, at least there's the constant flow of a common culture in the background, but tourists are much more disruptive... and disruptive in a very irritating way.  A few tourists in an area don't affect it much, but as the numbers grow, the tourists become a major generative force for the area's atmosphere and at a certain point, tourists destroy the original atmosphere of a place and replace it with a shallow amusement park atmosphere.  I don't think the politicians calling for more-more-more tourism comprehend how destructive it is to the local culture.

It's amazing how even just a little bit of plant life improves the atmosphere of a place!

I was sorry to see that the record and CD shop was longer in business....

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/

1991モザイク通りと山手線 2021品川区の裏道

(2021) Narrow walkways like this are increasingly rare in Tokyo, but I always enjoy them, as they are a refuge from the fire-breathing machinery on most of the roads in the city.  Something I'd really like to experience is walking around in Tokyo (Edo) before the advent of automobiles.

(2021) It used to be that people generally put living plants around their residences, even when there was very little space to do so.  Unfortunately, many now opt to bury the ground around houses in concrete, which must be easy - no watering or trimming to do, but spaces are so much better with living plants.

(1991) Shinjuku Station... waiting for a train.  Certainly platform walls make it much safer, but there was something quite interesting about looking down the railway tracks, like in the picture above, with everyone standing in full view on the open platforms.

(1991) Notice the dotted white line.  That used to be the only line, and the platform announcements asked people to stay behind the white line.  Then they installed the broad yellow strips for braille walking behind the yellow line.  Since the yellow strips were intended for walking on, the white line kept its original purpose... until they did away with the white line and began telling people to stay behind the broad yellow braille line.  Sensible enough I suppose, except that for certain parts of the platform, the only way to walk down the platform is to walk on or inside the braille line.

(平成三年) 新宿モザイク通り... I first walked down this oasis-like diagonal lane in 1984... and have always enjoyed using it to get to and from the west and south exits of Shinjuku Station.  Sadly it was closed last month since they are tearing down the department stores in the area to make way for larger buildings.

平成三年の新宿モザイク通り

平成三年の新宿モザイク通り

平成三年の新宿モザイク通り

平成三年の新宿モザイク通り

平成三年の新宿モザイク通り

平成三年の新宿モザイク通り

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/

Vintage Film Camera Photos

For the first time in... about... twenty-six years, I took some film pictures.  Taking film pictures was the only way to record visual images when I got into photography, and I took exclusively still pictures (I would have liked to try taking film movies, but couldn't afford to) with film cameras until 1990, when I bought my first (analog) video camera.  From early 1990 until mid-1993 I took video exclusively and then (temporarily) gave up on video in 1993 (after all the cameras were worn out) and bought a Nikon FM2.  I took still photos with that until 1997, when I lost the Nikon FM2 camera (depressing event).  At the time, I couldn't afford to buy a proper replacement camera, so instead of buying a low-quality cheap camera, I stopped taking photos and recorded the things I saw with handwritten text instead.  In the year 2000, I could finally afford to buy a camera again and I bought my first digital camera.  From 2000 until about 2007, I took a lot of digital still photos and then gradually got back into video (with digital cameras).

So... that's the background.  I've always considered my years with film cameras to be good training in composition and thinking about images before taking them, but basically prefer digital photography, since I like to take a lot of images and even when there was only film to work with, I would dream of having a camera that would allow me to take as many pictures as I wanted to take, which became a reality with digital cameras.  That said, there are nice aspects to using a fully mechanical camera and taking film pictures.  You can't see the results until after processing, so you are much more careful with each image.  And the analog photos, even after they've been digitized to publish online, have a different quality to them than digital photos.  Considering that the "filters" people use with micro-computer slabs can produce similar effects, I suppose the color balance is a big part of it, but in any case, the images I'm using for this blog post were all taken with a vintage rangefinder camera onto film, and then digitized after processing.

Since these pictures were the first ones I've taken with film in a quarter century and also from the first roll of film I've taken with a vintage rangefinder camera that I recently acquired, they're kind of test pictures.  That being the case, I'll make some technical comments and also include two or three images I probably wouldn't have used had I been taking pictures with my usual camera.  Okay, so let's get to the pictures!

The picture up at the top of this post is my favorite picture from the roll, so I've put that in the most prominent location.  The second picture is from the same location.  The third picture is one I want to make some technical comments about.  It was underexposed, and I need to figure out the cause.  The vintage camera I'm using is fully manual and doesn't have any kind of internal light meter, so I'm using an old vintage light meter to see what shutter speed and aperture settings I need.  Color negative film has a wide latitude, so you can have under or overexposed images and the prints will still turn out okay, but this picture is pretty obviously underexposed (which you can tell from the excessive grain and lack of color saturation).  I think it must be either due to the age of the camera having shifted the actual speed of the shutter (versus what the settings indicate) and/or the old light meter I'm using isn't very accurate.  And the fourth picture (above this block of text) I would title: Wintertime Tokyo.  This image has that general look of digitized photos from decades ago... but it was taken in January 2023.

The color balance is way off for this picture (above).  Since the camera is purely mechanical and the image was recorded onto film, the color balance was set (automatically by a machine I think) when the film was processed and digitized.  I could readjust it, but the purpose of this post to highlight the results of my first roll of film taken in a very long time, with a vintage camera used by me for the first time, so I'll just leave it as is.

I like this photo, but hate that it's a little crooked (meaning I wasn't holding the camera exactly straight).  And that's it for this blog post.  I'll still be primarily taking digital photos, but I'm planning to take film pictures from time-to-time.

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/ - lookback1997.blogspot.jp/

Another Sleepless Night

Another one of those nights where I slept just for a short bit, then woke up and couldn't get back to sleep... so I thought I'd toss some text I wrote on the train system back in November 2022 into a blog post (with pictures from the year 2000):

20221110  (木) AM - Morning commute.  This morning there seem to be fewer leering tourists (and others) about, which is a relief.  The more time goes by, the more I hate tourism.  All those flying metallic tubes inexpensively carrying people here and there to places they visit for nearly purely frivolous reasons.  I guess there was a rush of out-of-their-element bipeds to see the fall colors?  Or maybe news of higher rates of the forevermore virus are helping keep them away?  Before the pandemic, there were so many tourists about that they made it difficult to walk down sidewalks at times and so when the flood of them was stopped by the pandemic, there was a feeling of the city belonging to its residents again.  But now the tourists are coming back....

Last week, as I sat on a similar morning train, there were an obnoxious couple sitting opposite me... this morning is a rather pleasant radio waves couple.  Just the ebb and flow of life on earth.  Ah!  A rather striking view of a nearly full or maybe full moon shining majestically in the pale blue morning sky.  Can't see the moon in the daytime?  Yes, you can - at times.

Back to the tourists though - the atmosphere is so much nicer when they are not about.  Xenophobic of me?  No - just a dislike of obnoxious people disrespectfully tramping about leering at the world as though they were superior beings or something.  So nice not to have such nasty creatures about.  Certainly there are exceptions, and I noticed some nice looking people about from other lands.  Welcome to them of course.

The train announcements on the train I'm on are unbelievably loud right now.  They are painful to the ears.  Always nice to torment the passengers I guess.

Coughing passenger - move to another carriage.  You can't use public transportation without being exposed to various things, but when someone has a very obvious and congested cough, it's something to get away from if possible.

The announcements... there is a reason (good or bad) for everything, so I do wonder why announcements at ear damaging levels are made by many (most?) of the railways on some (most?) of the trains.  The only really practical reason I can think of is that they are made as an anti-loitering measure.  They are loud enough to wake the dead buried on distant planets, so they must help get sleepers off the trains at the correct stops and also prevent campers from riding the trains as shelter instead of transportation.  The volume varies from line to line... some are very reasonable, and some are shockingly loud.  (All of the pictures in this post were taken on May 12th, 2000.)

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/

Morning Train

The problem with writing is that true thought is wordless, so when you want to express wordless things with words, it's never going to be entirely accurate.  The tools that words are, while a truly wonderful thing (when used correctly, or a horrible thing when used otherwise) are always going to do an imperfect job of conveying what you want to convey.  And so it is today, as I sit on an early morning train, speeding through Tokyo.  This morning has been a smoothly flowing one... so far!  You  never know what's going to happen after all.  When you're in a smooth flow, the many elements of... everything, the people around you, the things around you, the temperature, the smells (or lack thereof), the atmosphere... everything... comprise the total picture of the value of existence.

- Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/