…of Japanese verse

1. Time, I think, to tell
of my love unrequited
of forming haiku

2. Though, technically, this
is not haiku; but tanka

Mamiya 645 Super

1. It was the Holga.

2. I hadn’t thought about shooting film since finishing Uni, after I no longer had access to the uni darkrooms. Film was expensive and sometimes difficult, and after I bought me a D70 there was just no going back. But in the back of my mind I’d always wanted to play with a medium format camera, but I never found one in the right price range that I really wanted.

3. And then I found this…:

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4. …a Mamiya 645 Super, for 38000 yen. Medium format is usually a fairly expensive proposition; most of it is pro gear, with the pricetag to match, or older cameras become sought-after by collectors, driving prices up. Luckily, these cameras can still be found for reasonable prices, and $400 is a pretty cheap way to play around with medium format.

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5. Unlike the Holga, this is a proper, serious camera. The lenses are great, and this was a pro model so it has a bunch of cool features, like a removable back that can accept anything from Polaroid film to digital systems. Not that I’m ever going near a digital back for this thing, not when the asking price for a Phase One P25 25MP back is somewhere around $25,000. Dude. And now for the obligatory Transformers shot:

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6. As you can see the film cartridge at the back comes off, as does the viewfinder prism (which you can replace with a prism with an auto-exposure function built in), and even the film winding crank (makes way for a handgrip / film advance motor). But, most of all, it’s just fun to play with; I love all the mechanical noises it makes, the way the film crank turns, the snapping of the shutter when it goes off…

7. I can’t wait to get back into the darkroom.

Team Fortress 2 (Forever)

1. I honestly haven’t gotten this excited over a game since… actually, I can’t remember. Maybe GT4. But I found this Team Fortress 2 trailer (a game, might I add, that has been in production for longer than Duke Nukem Forever) on YouTube and I’m excited all over again!

New photos

1. I just put a bunch of new photos online, including photos from my recent Tokyo trip, the jumping shots, as well as an update of another gallery. Enjoy!

Holga

1. The Girlfriend (who is a different person from the last time I mentioned her) is a keen photographer, in fact, she was a wedding photographer a few years ago. She quit doing that because shooting weddings is a dull, dull gig.

2. But getting back to the point, The Girlfriend is a keen photographer, of the analogue kind. These days she doesn’t shoot regular cameras, she prefers the more esoteric types, and has developed quite the collection of Lomo cameras. They’re pretty good fun, almost completely lacking in controls, it’s the ultimate point and shoot.

3. Anyway, for my birthday she bought me a Holga, a chinese made toy camera that shoots 120 roll film and literally looks and built like a toy:

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4. It’s great fun, and shoots photos like this:

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5. It’s way awesome, the lens only focuses in the middle, everything else is distorted and it vignettes like a fisheye. There are even mods that let you mount a Holga lens on a digital SLR, but the mods require you to hold the lens to the body, and that’s just a bit too crude. The flash is bloody terrible too, but such awesome fun to play with. I’ve got it loaded up with some Kodak TMax B&W film, gonna play with it a bit more to get the hang of it. Makes me want a medium format camera all the more!

The Merry Month of May

1. ‘Tis be a merry month, for today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me! Yesterday a big group of us celebrated with a big big picnic by the river in the Peace Park, enjoying the spring sunshine and the river views and the many many cans of beer we all consumed. Strangely, I have almost no photos of the occasion, as neither photos nor words could describe just how much fun I had.

2. Last weekend was the Golden Week holidays, and a friend and I went up to Tokyo for a few days during the holidays. I took a lot of photos for that, and I’m sorting them out now. We also started a series of photos featuring my friend, Derek, who has an almost abnormal fondness for jumping in photos. Check it out here.

3. I also got myself a new mobile — a Nokia N73. It’s essentially an upgrade of my old phone here, the aging Nokia 6680. It’s a good phone, but damn the N73 is awesome! Even with Softbank’s (and other Japanese carriers) insistence on locking their phones down stupid levels (my phone doesn’t support playing mp3 files, can’t install many programs available on the internet even when it works with regular the N73) and removing functionality (my phone ships with Adobe Reader and Lifeblog, neither of which is on my phone), it still does so much — I use it like an iPod Shuffle, got about 1 Gig’s worth of music on it, as well watching movies and tv shows (converted to the same format as for the iPod) and for showing my photos. The screen is brilliant, the web browser is super sweet, and the camera does an ok job of taking pics. The camera, though, is really, really slow, even compared to the cheapest point-n-shoot digital. Even so, it’s a great phone.

4. New phone and holiday aside, I’ve also reined in the spending, and have started saving in earnest. My travel plans are changing by the day, which makes it difficult to know how much I need to save — so I’m just going to save as much as possible and see where we go from there.

5. That’s that for now, I’m going back to playing with all my presents!

About Japanese Literature

1. A curious observation came up recently amongst a few friends while we were talking about the books we were reading. We were all reading something written by a Japanese author, and the discussion led to other Japanese authros that we’ve read; in the course of our conversation a common theme was how depressing Japanese authors can be. I’m hardly well versed in Japanese literature — my experience of Japanese fiction extends no further than a handful of Murakamis and Koushun Takami’s Battle Royal, but in a group of four only one of us managed to come up with a Japanese book that wasn’t depressing in any way. The rest deals with pain and loss, or violence, or oppression; the list of depressing subjects goes on. So why are Japanese authors so damn depressing? And if we know it’s depressing, why do we keep reading it?

2. Right, back to Murakami.