more than a month

While I am in Japan I am doing what is called an Independant Study through my school, which means I am getting credit for one class while being here. For the class I send my teacher a number of photos every week along with a journal. This is a direct copy and paste from my thoughts expressed to him in my 'journal' for the week. They seemed to work as a blog for the evening:

After being here over a month, sadly, I'm almost getting used to it. It has been quite a challenge to keep fresh eyes and a fresh perspective on everything. I honestly did not expect myself to get used to being here so quickly, I thought that everything would feel new and unique the entire time. I should have known better. Don't get me wrong, I still find joy in the pictures drawn on signs and can't help but crack a smile at the little old lady/man with decades of life etched into the wrinkles of their face. I just keep trying to challenge myself to find more...maybe I just need to think slightly simpler. I dunno really...but I look forward to finding out this week which it is.

It was actually last week that I had this realization as I was writing on my blog about Japan and I posted a photo of a lady sitting next to the road waiting for her ride home after work. When I took her photo and we exchanged smiles and laughs, did she ever think that within hours of that moment people all over the globe would, if desired, have access to see her face on my blog? Photography is, as you say, truly a priviledge and people must have a certain level of trust to allow their photo to be made. Especially in a country where communication is limited to body language it is so important to be able to portray trust to someone in the 10-15 seconds of interaction while making a photo of them.

I know this is getting long, but I wanted thank you for your advice on editing through piles of photos. It is indeed so hard to be honest with myself as to why I like the photo. Honestly, I am not sure that have fully learned to do it well. What is even harder for me when I'm looking through photos is to forget what others 'would/will' think. When I see an image that I like, the thought always goes through my head of wondering if someone else would like it too, or do I just like it because I made it and I think it's neat? I'd like to say that all that matters is if I like it but other's opinions do matter at some point down the line, sometimes sooner than later.

I guess these would be the questions that I usually ask myself when editing; they seem pretty shallow after actually writing out what goes through my head:

1. Do I like this image? (usually a judgment made rather quickly)
2. Do I like it because of the emotions that go along with it? or is it actually good?
3. Usually at this point I question myself as to whether or not it's a photo that I'm looking forward to showing someone else. I guess this is because what I love so much about photography is the opportunity to share it.

Okay, so that's the end of the 'copy/paste'. I guess i'll just attach a photo and go to bed; Kaduaki and Masako, koto players that are in the video.

lost in Japan adventure!

David's cousin Amelia is here visiting and she and I decided yesterday to take the train into Chiba City and get some stuff done. John dropped us off at the train station at 11:15 and helped us buy our first tickets. It's nearly and hour and a half train ride and we made it to Chiba. We were so stoked to arrive and be in the right place and everything! So, we decided to go eat some lunch! The first place we tried was closed....we wante to go there because their menu had a lot of pictures! Oh well, so we chose another place that had food displayed in the window and looked cheap. We were pretty surprised when we were seated at a table with other people...turns out it's the kinda place with big tables instead of small tables and everyone just sits together. Pretty fun! Although, not a whole lot of pictures of the menu, so when the waitress came Amelia just pointed at someone elses food and gestured "two" with her hands.....it worked! We both got a nice bowl of "Raw-men" noodles and it was cheap too! Anyway, we left there and wandered around the city for a few hours. I bought a new external harddrive (which was the main purpose of the trip, aside from adventure) and we also found starbucks, where we got some coffee, YAY! The rest of our time there was filled with laughing at hilarious English on t-shirts and perusing a 6 story mall with VEEERY expensive cothing, weird furniture, and a ¥100 store where we spent ever more time after discovering that everything was $1.

Well, then it looked like it was going to start raining to so we decided to head back to the station. Surprisingly we were not overly lost and found it with ease. Getting correct tickets to go home, on the other hand, was not so succesful. We found and information booth with a lady that spoke English and she pretty much just took up time that we needed to get the the train we thought was leaving at 5:30; no help at all! Oh well, we just went to the machine and bought the tickets that sounded pretty good and headed for the train. Upon arriving where we thought we should be, the train we thought we would see was not there, but instead a local train that said it was going to the correct destination. Riding the local train is alright, it just takes another half and hour longer and we had payed for express tickets. We remembered that we needed a local train to get to Soga before transfering to the express, so we jumped on the local train and got off at Soga. But, when we got there and showed our tickets to someone in charge they said we needed to change our tickets. So, they changed them for us and gave us ¥400 back...score! Well, the express train came and we got on...but upon arriving at Kuratsua Yamoitaria (or something like that, I have no idea) everyone got off the train and we had to also. BUT!! As we got off and looked across the tracks there was a local train that said "Kamogawa", where we needed to go! So, we just jumped on there and figured that it'd get us there eventually, so whatever!

After getting on the train we started looking at this map to see if it looked right and we had pretty much convinced ourselves that it was and then we started recognizing people; we were in the exact same car on the same train that we had started out on when we left Chiba the first time.All we did was get off at Soga, take an express to this other station (after a bit of a wait) and get back on the same train again! We were laughing soooo hard! anyway, we made it home in exactly 2 hours with such a fun story to tell!

So, that was my day and my first experience with traveling on the trains without someone that speaks Japanese. And wow, everything is soooo much harder when you can't even try and pronounce stuff that you see written because it's not in Roman letters!

on set in Japan

Well, I'm blogging, at this point the planned blog in my head is boring and would most likely bore you to death. So, I'm going to attempt to spice it up and conjure up some good stories...of stuff that actually happened, don't worry! Just stuff that's not currently in my head to blog about, you get the picture! It's of David looking at the monitor while the "actors" do a scene for the music video of "Kamogawa". That was Saturday, "Day 1" of the shoot. You probably recognize the set from the last blog about the Japanese ranch.....yeah, same place. The crew that came to work on the video thought that it was the most amazing place.

The crew was so fun! There were...lets see...1,2,3,4,5,6,7....there were 7 of them. All of them fairly experienced in the film world, so David had a great time learning some stuff from them, as well as directing them. Even though they were all more experienced than he is, they were so quick to do whatever he wanted even if they knew a better way to do it. Pretty awesome. Me, I just wandered around taking photos of anything and everything they did.....over 1000 of them in two days. Here is another one of them. This is Natsuko (Nachan as a nickname); she's been written about in this blog before, but she's the main actress in the film. She's never acted before and she's doing an amazing job! oh Yeah, the crew....we had a great time trying to communicate through body language and their few english words and my even fewer Japanese words. But we managed to laugh a lot and I even learned some new stuff! Like "hena nijongene"; which is a great response to "Baka Gaijin"....because it means 'You're a weird japanese person'. As a point of clarification a japanese person would NEVER EVER call a foreigner stupid; only if you're good friends and they are joking around. This culture is waaaay too polite for that.

Anway, it was a great weekend, lots of fun, lots of locations (I think there were like 5 around the city) and lots of photos.....like 1000. Seriously...over a thousand actually. OH yeah, a funny story! So, Saturday night we went out to a fried fish place....the fish was AMAZING!!!!!! We were sitting there at our table and this drunk girl came in (probably around 25) and stops at our table, saluted us and said, (in very loud terrible english) "goooood morning". David and his cousin Amelia and I just started laughing soooo hard! It was the most hilarious thing ever. She said a few other things throughout the night that were pretty funny, but I won't go into them. Alright.....it's Monday.....another week in Japan to come!