Today is my second weekend in Tachikawa, Japan. I was hoping that the weather would be a bit brighter, warmer, and dryer than it’d been during the week, but Saturday started out with rain and cold. And to add insult to injury, I’ve been nursing an infection in my right ear. While I woke up early enough to get out and take a train somewhere, I wasn’t feeling all that great. After a small breakfast, I came back to the hotel room and took a morning nap.

That actually turned out to be for the best. While my body worked to try to get into a better state, the rain moved on out and the temperature rose a bit into something more comfortable. When I woke up around 11:30 am local time I grabbed both the E-M5 and the E-M10 and made the decision not to travel, but to walk back to Kokuei Showa Memorial Park and pay to get into the rest of the park.

Kokuei Showa is huge, especially for an urban park. The part I walked around that first day in Japan is just the tiny, free, front part. The rest requires that you purchase a ticket for 410円, or $3.41. Not a bad price to get into the what turned out to be a really nice place to walk about for nearly three hours.

Once I got through the gates I was greeted by a long beautifully landscaped lawn, flanked by broad walkways and trees (ginkgos), with smaller fountains that lead to a much larger one at the end.

Once I walked past this area, I continued on until I came to the Spring Magic Garden where tulips where growing in profusion. This is where I spent the majority of my time, slowly walking and taking a lot of photos.

And did I mention there were tulips here? Yes, yes there are.

What I brought back in my cameras doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of all that’s in that park, let alone do justice to all the beauty out there. I loved every minute of it. Out in the middle of the park, where the tulips were blooming, the urban noises became almost totally silent. Walking through the green was balm for my soul. As the sun set and the evening chill began to settle over the park, I left in a much better frame of mind than when I walked in.

Photographs

The majority of the stills (and all the tulip closeups) were taken with the E-M5 and the Olympus 45mm. The JPEGS as viewed on my iPad Air 2 are stunning. My Samsung notebook can’t do justice to them. All the images are straight out of the camera, with only cropping applied. The cloudy day made for perfect lighting, and I took full advantage of it. I’ve also got the camera tweaked now to give me pretty close, if not dead on, color out of the camera. And the 45mm, going on three years, still continues to astound me. Every time I think I aught to get the black version because it will look better with my black bodies, I go use it like today and forget all about wasting money on a different colored version.

I had an interesting talk with one of my work hosts today about cameras in Japan. I asked him what the most popular camera in Japan was, and he immediately said Nikon. And then he said “and Canon, too.” And then he reached into his pocket and pulled out his smart phone, which was his camera. It’s all he wants, needs, and can afford. It allows him to make stills and video, and to share it with his family and friends either directly by showing them on his smart phone screen or putting them up on any number of social networks.

And he’s not the first Japanese to say this. Others I’ve talked to since my first trip to Japan in December 2013 have said essentially the same thing. And it shows in the general crowds of people I see around me. No matter where I go, I see very few DSLRs. In fact, I see very few “just cameras” at all. The only time I saw any to speak of was at the park when I first arrived. There, I saw three, two Sony E-mount cameras and a Nikon DSLR equivalent to the D5500. Everybody else was using their smartphone.

I’m an anachronism when it comes to “just cameras.” And I think the pool of us particular anachronisms is growing smaller, partly through us dying off, and partly through some of us saying the hell with it and embracing the smartphone camera. And it’s killing the entire ILC market in the process. I’d embrace the Samsung Galaxy S4 more if the output weren’t such crap (see above for example). That photo at the top of my Olympus E-M10 and the two lenses (Panasonic 14mm and Olympus 17mm) is probably the end of the line for me. The next camera I get won’t be an E-M5 II or even an E-M1 II, but probably the Samsung Galaxy S6. I can’t see spending thousands of dollars any more for cameras. I can justify a good camera these days if it’s part of something else that I need, such as my cell phone.

I’ve tried to experiment with using WiFi to move photos off my E-M10 to my iPad and then up to Flickr. But its a lot easier to just move the photo straight from the S4 where it was taken to Flickr. Although, truth be told, moving images up to Flickr can be painfully slow these days, regardless of the method (phone, iPad, or notebook). But the steps are far fewer to move from captured image to final destination if you’re using your smartphone. And none of the camera makers really seem to understand that. Cost and the aggravation of getting the images off the ILC cameras such as the E-M10 are killing interest and patience for a lot of potential customers. For an awful lot of people ease of use trumps any superior image advantage that the ILC has over the smartphone.