The One Man Bicycle Band

So a few years ago, when I came to Japan for the first time, I recorded a video of a man who rode around on his bicycle performing a solo concert.  He made a lot of the equipment himself, customising it so that it fits onto his bike.

This is the original video:

I saw him again recently!  Doing the same thing in the same park, still as energetic as he was before.

I made a video:

Unfortunately the cicadas are incredibly loud and I was using the microphone built into the camera, not something conducive to good sound quality but until I become a millionaire, it'll have to do!

Cherry Blossoms

So it was quite a good week for taking pictures of flowers, cherry blossoms abound!

Unfortunately the cherry blossoms don't last particularly long, so I've only got a couple of pictures.  I took absolutely tons of them, but I didn't get any that were particularly interesting.  These two are decent enough to have a quick look at, in case you've forgotten what they look like since last year.

I went to shinjuku park which has hundreds of trees with dozens of varieties, so the colours were different from tree to tree.  Interestingly enough they were all shades of pink.  I wonder if it's simply impossible to breed them into different colours, or whether the idea of cherry blossom colour is so important to Japanese people that they refuse to try to make something a little more interesting.

There are, however, a million shades from white to bright pink.  This is one of the pinkest varieties I could find.  The centre mass is darker because of the shade, but you can see how delicate the petals actually are when the light shines through them, as in the edge petals.

The video is a better representation of the general blossomness in Japan as of last week, check it out!

The Film Version

The film version is never as good as the book, but these colours are really great so I'm tempted to say that the film camera can still kick it.

As per usual, these are the low quality jpg's they gave me on a DVD.  I have the negatives so I can make high quality prints directly (well I can't, but someone can) or I can scan them in with a decent scanner and get decent files that way.

I really, really like the reds this particular film gives.  I don't know whether that's a thing (having film toned towards good looking reds) but they do have film aimed towards nice skin tones.  If I ever get a willing victim in front of the lens I'll try some of that out and see what the results are like.

This is the colour version of the black and white one I took before.  Except this time it's from the film camera.  I waited for literally an hour, sitting on the next bench in line waiting for the entire avenue to clear.  Needless to say it didn't and the light was fading, so I left with only this shot.

The colours really are nice.  I like this new camera quite a lot.  (It's a bit expensive to get films done regularly though).

Last Colours of Autumn

So these are the last photographs from the Autumn season.

The night before I went out it started raining and winding all over the place.  The result was a floor covered in leaves and trees very much lacking them.

The trees that retained their leaves were showing some really interesting colours though, so even though they were a bit thin, they made up for it in impact.

The yellows played off the greens really well.  There are a lot of evergreens in Japan, so there are a lot of pictures like this one.

Obligatory black and white picture.

A decent mix of colours on show.

In the more enclosed areas around Shinjuku Gyoen there were a lot more trees intact.

It was mainly yellow when I went, so I wonder if the different trees are uniformly different colours or whether they start of yellowing then move through oranges and reds.

This is the most stock-photo-esque picture I think I've ever taken.

It was a tossup between making this one b/w or leaving it as is.  I was tired and sitting on a bench waiting for one of the above pictures (too many people) so I took this one while eating a sandwich.

Autumn Colour

So I made a really quick video showing the kinds of colours you find around Japan in the Autumn.  It really is quite spectacular.