Blog

The photographic blog of Sean Wood (aka motionid)

Takahiro Tanaka

My Friend Tanaka san had another exhibition at his studio the other week. Every time I've been there he's surprised me with a new set of work completely different from the last yet totally consistent with the theme that seems to run through all his work.

You can take a look at it all here: http://www.takahirotanaka.net/

The work he was showing this time was created over a 20 year period. Each canvas acting as a protective sheet as he made his paintings. The canvas itself becoming the art hundreds of paintings later. I can't help but be impressed with his single mindedness when it comes to following a theme. Everything he does is black and white or as he would like to put it "Grey". From photographs to paintings to found objects, graphic design and even music (noise compositions) he is consistent in theme and his minimal approach. I only wish he got more exposure for his work as it, as a collection, really unlike anything I have seen.

If you want to see his work and he's not having a show drop him a mail. I'm sure he won't mind letting you peek into his studio if you ask nicely :-)

Obon - お盆

There is an Obon festival (お盆の阿波踊り) not far from my place that my wife's Awa Odori team performs at every year. It's very local and always a great atmosphere with kids running around. If you ever visit Japan at the end of summer I recommend visiting one if you have the chance. Always a great community feeling.

Choices

I went out for a bit of practice on Friday. Need to brush up the skills for the upcoming Awa Odori event in Koenji in August. This also gave me a chance to try out a few Ai servo modes to find what worked and what didn't. Kind of impressed with the iso on this shot. Difficult to tell because of the size but at 2000 iso this is pretty clean. I'd suggest looking at the tags below for details about what was used to practice with.

Kyodo Awa Odori

So the Tensyouren team my wife belongs to were at Kyodo in Setagaya again this year. It seems to be a tradition to make an appearance. It's really just practice for them for the big even at the end of August in Koenji.The streets are too narrow to take any real pictures but I go all the same and try to take a few snaps of team for the archives. This has prompted me to do a bit of street shooting in preparation for the event in August. Too mach time using medium format cameras has slowed my reflexes somewhat.

Kodoji

There is a little bar in Kabukicho that holds exhibitions for photographers. Some very famous ones have and do exhibit there. One night I happen to be there and a photographer was having an exhibition. The subject of his work happen to turn up and she turned out to be pretty friendly. Taken with the permission of the photographer and the subject. Names have long been forgotten.

Kanazawa to Tōjinbō

This is one of my favorite photos.On the train from Kanazawa to Tōjinbō there are these mountains that line the edge of the coast. I was sporting the 150mm lens for the Hasselblad and managed to take a few shots out of the window. Once I returned and developed the film I realized that the developer had died and there were real issues with how the film turned out. I was really surprised and happy to find that the mistake actually made the shot.

The buildings

buildings.jpg

New home for an old photo.I was visiting Sydney one year and wandering around the city on my own. It looked like rain but I risked taking the camera out. A drop of water hit me and i looked up and saw this almost symmetrical view of these two buildings. By some miracle I got the exposure right.

Eclipse 2012

Well, that was a fun morning.

Tokyo Decadence

In 2008 I had a chance to shoot an event called Tokyo Decadence. Run by a French guy the event is aimed at the crowd that likes to dress-up. If you come dressed in an outfit you get in for free otherwise it's 3000 yen or so (if I can remember that far back). Most of these have been languishing on my drive since then with nothing to do. Figured they might as well see the light of day. A little different than TMax 400 :-)

website makeover

It's been too long coming. I've finally gotten around to redoing the 50mm site. In theory I should have had the blog and the site run from the same installation of Wordpress but that would just take up too much of my time.The new site is slowly coming together and with it a review on what goes on there and what should be going on the blog. You might find a few thing's missing from the new site. If that's the case start looking for them on the blog. Which means that I'm likely going to post a lot of old stuff up here in the near future. Some of which has not seen the light of day and should I guess (bit of a waste otherwise). The new site is nothing special but, being a designer, it took me ages to find a balance between functionality and simplicity. That and I kept changing my mind every five minutes so I guess that doesn't help. There will be a style issue between the blog and the new site. Something I will need to work on over time to bring into alignment. I've gone for a responsive design this time around which means it should work on devices other than a computer. One issue I have discovered, however, is the ipad 3 is causing issues regarding file sizes. The resolution of the screen is so high I need to serve very large images so they look good. This has quite an impact on load time and is not being helped by a bug in the slideshow code that prevents the loading animation from displaying. I could work on serving up two or three versions of the images but that might have to wait until after the site is launched.

Stay tuned.

A day at the beach

During the holiday period (to be politically correct for Americans, or, as most Australians like to call it, Christmas)  I returned to Australia with plans to do a fair bit of shooting both inland and on the coast. My plans were dogged with sicknesses and bad weather which resulted in only a handful of pictures I managed to make while I was there. I was fortunate that the day was overcast and there was enough cloud in the sky to make the shots interesting. I've always liked dogs on the beach so while I was on the 35km strip I searched out the lone dog who became the feature of this three image set.

Shot on TMax 100 and developed in Tmax developer but scanned with the brightness and contrast way down so I was able to screw with the balance afterward.

A view near Fuji

As part of the trip to Aokigahara Jukai we also took a little drive around Mt. Fuji and through the road that leads right through the forest. To our surprise we came to a lookout area along the way.This is the result. Inford Pan F+ 50 shot using the Rolleiflex and an ND 8 filter and developed in Rodinal at 20c. The neg's turned out a lot more grainy than I expected but I guess that's what Rodinal will do.