autumn tactics

こんにちは。今週末私のブース、「複視」に来て頂いたの皆様、どうも有難うございました！

写真が好きでしたら、是非私のネットギャラリーご覧ください。いっぱい面白い写真が載っています。何かご意見や質問があれば、いつでもメールしてください。fukushi@ichigoichie.org.

Do you remember my eyes? How they shift between blue and grey depending on the weather? The amber ring in the center that catches the sunlight?

Yes, the circumstances have changed, but my eyes and the soul behind them are still the same.

I’ve been slogging towards another milestone at work, the third such hellacious one this year, and less than thirty days since the last. I lay down new features and design revisions to my libraries as fast as countless legions of content creators can swoop down on them, testing little and barely carving out the absolute minimum to make it run. And it comes in an office where the thermometer reads 95 and builds are broken all day long from a trail of bungling and sufficient specification all the way back to 2006.

But, as they say, the show must go on. And it will go on, and I do all that I can in the 80 odd minutes between getting home from work and brushing my teeth for bed. Only an angel keeps me together and my dreams alive with an eyedropper of hope.

Here are some pictures I took with the Holga last year and just managed to get scanned the other day.

せっかく日記を復活したけど、二ヶ月が過ごして、連絡していないね。ごめん。普段は毎月10-15回くらい書きますが、今年はなかんか余裕がない。来月はまた展示会があります。しかも、固くて決心しても今回が一番中途半端になっています。仕事はきつい、毎日23：30ごろ家に到着してる。なぜか、ライフがもっと複雑か、年取っているか、毎日～6時間の睡眠が足りなくて、だるい。

とにかく、今日も、明日も、仕事ですが、深夜製作中．．．

1983. Annie closes on Broadway after 2,377 shows. Gandhi wins Best Picture as Return of the Jedi picks up steam. Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The De Lorean Motor Company ceases production, and the McNugget is introduced. I am three years old and love Ernie. Konica also produces a charming little pocket rangefinder with auto focus, shutter, and film winding, all for the low, low price of 47,800 yen.

For some time now, I have wanted a lightweight “junk” camera that I can always have with me and throw in any number of bags. The A-1 is too versatile and valuable a piece of equipment to have jostled around in my backpack all the time. The 70-210mm zoom lens is also intimidating to a lot of people.

Anyway, I didn’t want to put a lot of money into said camera because that would defeat the purpose. So I’ve been coming flea markets and Akihabara back alleys for a couple of months. I finally found what I was looking for last weekend while helping out the Nihon Furosato Food Festival. I bought shiny, black, brick from a kindly, well-traveled old man who spoke way too much like a used car salesman. But the camera was impeccably well kept, spotless and hardly a scratch on it– inconceivable for a 25 year old consumer shoot-and-forget camera.

Though I have had a decent array of camera bodies for a while, this marks the first time I’ve ever had film bodies at the same time. I realized today how nice this was when shooting the annual hanami raves in Yoyogi park this afternoon. The weather was a real drag, frigid, raining, and dark. But having 1600 Natura pushed to 3200 in the A-1 and 400 Presto in the Konica, I felt confident that I could handle any number of shots without feeling the pressure to finish a roll for switching stock.

For the first time in a long time I have a considerable scan backlog now, so once I get through my slides I’ll make an album in the Gallery dedicated to Konnie.

Just a short note to say that this morning I processed and got another album up in Gallery. This time the subject is my walking trip of Kyoto during last New Year’s. A number of interesting posts came out of the trip, so you may enjoy reading them again while watching a slideshow of the photos in the background.

Cheers!

Though I’ve been taking pictures of raves for seven years, I rarely ever post pictures from them. However, last weekend I went to Tenrinsai in Fukushima, and was set on taking a substantial number of photographs. I planned for varying weather conditions (Centuria), as well as extremely low light levels (Super Presto 1600, pushed to 3200). In the end I got through six rolls of film on the A-1 and Macha’s borrowed Holga, with a couple snapshots in between with the PowerShot. There are some very show-worthy shots, though if I can successfully integrate them into a theme is another issue.

I have some reflection to put up along with these, but for now just take a look the pictures, and get a little taste of Japanese country psytrance.

Recently, every time it’s been sunny outside I’ve had the almost overpowering urge to climb on the Enjoy, ride around with a couple of rolls of Super Gold, and get a crackle-cold bin beer at the peak of my adventure. This is most assuredly the natural romantic in me augmented by my swollen loathing of computers. However, as nice as it generating gigabytes of data to archive, it creates a disproportional amount of back stock which may never see the light of day.

You are probably thinking, “Rusty, I haven’t gotten any pings from your Gallery RSS in months. I see a fair number of shots in your blog, but it’s just a tiny sliver from what you’ve been up to with little frame of reference.”

Yes, yes, you’re right. If I don’t improve my skills on the post-shutter click side of things, I’ll never get anything better for the shows. The truth is, I have enough material to produce years’ worth of similarly-assembled appearances at Geisai and Design Festa. But, there are three major problems with it all:

1) it’s unprocessed
2) it’s all unrelated (aside from the relation of my mundane current style, which draws jaded criticism in its own right)
3) the presentation medium is sparse, fragmented, and high school level

So, today despite it being one of the last few hot glorious days of summer, I stayed in this morning and put together two new albums for Gallery. One is touristy (thusly in Travel), and another slightly more artistic (in Tokyo Bicycle Wanderings).

The former is my trip to Seoul which happened only three weeks ago! That’s a pretty good turnaround for me. The latter is a trip to the Arakawa in July. Of particular interest to shutterbugs is that this set is a mix of the A-1 and 5D, and some similar shots are set up around the river, so you can see the differences in the medium and my current mastery of the formats. It’s not very scientific, the comparison factor was probably just in the back of my mind. So keeping this in mind, Ken, have a look and let me know what you think (provided I ever get the damn comments working again.)

on being

what is techno what is love?

to illuminate or fade, so many choices at instants in our life.
unthought, unspoken, unfelt, but in the pit of our souls a gear is turning.

yes today was x, y, and z.
tomorrow I will do great things and be songworthy
but no… yet no…

now we are faced with a challenge as always:
to burn, or to fold.
tomorrow is uncertain, now the blood of time is within you.
so ignite! so shine!
so give every last drop of your beautiful broken life to the stars,
for only in this instant will they weep for you!

on dancing

pulse until you drop thrive shake and spin
do not listen to the music!
run ahead of it!

you already know the next four beats, this is obvious.
they have telegraphed themselves into your brain,
you need only to complete the sequence.
it is a game of chess encoded in the rhythm of raindrops;
you have no choice honestly except to submit to their will.

Je suis revenu de mes vacances à la Corée, toutefois je suis toujours en vacances à la maison parce que maintenant c’est obon. Je passe mes jours dans la ville prenant des photographies. Il fait chaud. Le ciel est bleu, et les pluies du soleil vers le bas sur mes épaules nues. J’erre, d’un air endormi observant le écoulement des touristes le long de l’avenue ombragée.

Pourquoi la vie me fascine-t-elle ainsi?

내일 나는 한국에 가고 있다. 짧은 여름 휴가 이다. 나는 많은 사진을 찍고, 나의 전표안에 쓴다.

여기 한국어안에 몇몇 낱말은 있는다.

사과 차 야구 고기 사회주의 여권 투명한 뜨거운 비 펜 구름 키보드 검정 유리 뚱뚱한 얇은 모자 사진기 말.

당 춤 종 일 생활 죽음 할머니 직물 웃음 외침 사랑.

언젠가, 너는 나를 사랑할 것이다.

나는 너를 위해 아름다울 것이 무언가를 살 것이다.

サヨナラ。

近年段々冷夏になってた感じがします。

でも相変わらず、夏です。ビーチへ行ったり、野球試合を見たり、都心にぶらぶら歩いて考えます。

何回もそのピリッとした気持ちを経験すると、活動は擦り切れたレーザーのような、柔軟になります。活動は古い友達で、哀れみ深い。一千回早稲田大学までのんびり乗る。青島ビンに結露が生じて、歩道のひびを見詰める。

ああ、夏…僕らは一生にお互いを飽きれない。

Recently I’ve been going over sites looking for for Photoshop コツ while playing with CS2, and it’s sobering at times to find photos that look a lot like mine in terms of processing. Though I’ve been getting decent mileage out of levels and unsharp mask, Eliot Shepard has it down to a science. The Slower atn he provides on his site boxes up the basic elements to fuss with into one cascade of dialogs.

Which shot do _you_ like better? Check out the incredible detail that emerges in the water droplets (enlargements here and here).

This sort of thing is gradually getting wired into the firmware for digital cameras (5D, cough) making it even more mainstream for people to have punchy contrast and crisp edges in their tailgate and dog show photos. Ultimately what this means is I need to start getting a lot more creative with composition, or give up enough of my life to be one of those full-time guys that has a digital SLR body grafted onto his hand to find offbeat subjects. Being an engineer with a hunk of debt I’ll go the former and ultimately have to lean more on artistry than technique.

I don’t how or where it’ll lead exactly, but I’ve got to start climbing up. I’ve overstayed my welcome on this plateau.