As I mentioned in the last post Andy and I spent about an hour after dinner just walking about, photographing Ikebukuro after sunset. Because of Tokyo’s location with regards to its time zone, the sun sets very early in the winter, a little after 4pm local time. We met around 6pm, ate dinner around 7pm, and started to photograph the area around 8pm. It was officially Dark when we started. And the place was lit up like the proverbial castle.

The Seiryu restaurant we ate at has an “open” window into the kitchen, right by the entrance. Here you can see one of the cooks as well as a few of the patrons at the bar that runs in front of the cooking area. This is a common enough design motif in Japan, seen at every raman shop I’ve eaten at so far in Japan (and I’ve eaten at about a half dozen so far).

While there are a lot of cars, vans, and trucks in Japan, there seem to be as many bikes (both pedal and motorized) if not more. The pedal bikes in particular are complex and well taken care of. They’ll have extra seats in the back to carry children, or they’ll have baskets on the front or back (or both) for carrying items such as groceries. Their complexity and quality level leads me to believe that pedal bikes in Japan aren’t cheap or cheaply made. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the cost of bikes hovering around US $1,000. That’s not that outrageous, considering I spent US $700 on a Canondale C400 back around 2000.

Sidewalks in Japan are much wider than in the states and it’s expected that bike (pedal) riders will make use of them. That means you need to be away and move out of the way when they come towards you. Anything motorized is on the main street.

Even at 8pm the streets were filled with people. Ikebukuro reminds me of New York (from the early 1980s) where everything is lit to daylight levels and businesses are in full gear. While I have no idea what everyone was doing, they seemed to have a perfectly good idea what they were about.

Ikebukuro is a place of color as well as motion and sound. Everywhere you looked was a riot of color.

Of cautious interest were the “Girl’s Bar” advertisements. I have no idea what was involved and carefully avoided finding out. I try not to be a prude, especially in other countries, but there’s no reason to go looking for trouble.

I wish I could have spent more time working at night. The Olympus E-M10 and the M.Zuiko 1.8/17mm handled themselves superbly in this situation. Of course, I believe that any competent camera would have worked a treat, especially in this very bright venue. Even the color seemed to come out correctly for most of these shots.

The limitations of the current sensor’s exposure range seemed to come out a bit while shooting, such as the photo four photos up. You can see where the very bright areas are showing blown highlights. But you know what? I don’t care. Everything else in that photo I cared about came out just fine.

I’m a photographer because I enjoy it. If I ever get to the point where I obsess over such minor issues then I won’t be enjoying it, and it’ll be time for me to hang up the cameras and retire to one of God’s waiting rooms[1] until I finally die.

[1] Also known as a Florida retirement community.

The first two weeks of December I was in Tokyo, Ikebukuro, Japan, providing technical support for Yama Sakura 67. This is the second year I’ve supported Yama Sakura; the very first time was last December, about this same time, in Chitose, Japan. I used that trip as the launch for this blog.

It just so happened that my first week in Tokyo overlapped the last week of Andy’s stay, who writes and maintains the atmtx web site, one of the better photography sites on the web.

I started my travel by leaving Orlando on the first Monday of December. After about 24 hours traveling and the international date line, I arrived mid-afternoon of the following Tuesday at Narita in Japan. It took several more days for me to get synced with the local time and to get the initial work tasks taken care of for Yama. Since Andy needed to leave that Friday, by simple process of elimination that left sometime on Thursday for the two of us to meet up and get introduced.

On an early Thursday evening Andy dropped by my hotel and we spent the next several hours just chatting, having dinner, and walking about a bit and photographing Ikebukuro, the part of Tokyo where I was staying (those photos, and others, will show up in later posts).

Andy showed up right on time with his Fuji X100T and Pentax Q7 in tow. He’d taken a train from where he was staying to meet me in my hotel lobby (the Hotel Metropolitan Tokyo). It’s literally across the street from the Ikebukuro train station, and the same train station also serves as a destination for the Narita Express. You can thus fly to Japan via Narita and then take a very nice train from the airport to the front door of this particular hotel. It was a very nice place to stay for both comfort and accessibility to key locations around the Tokyo megalopolis.

After a few moments going through introductions we left the hotel and began to wonder around the train station. We eventually settled on supper at Seiryu, a chain of Japanese Izakaya similar to the old Stake and Ale franchise restaurants here in the US in that they specialize in local cuisine (Japanese in this case) as well as many types of beverages, such as ales, beers, and mixed drinks. Neither one of us drank anything that night, choosing instead to have a few Cokes and just fill up on the good food.

Towards the end of the meal we really began to talk in earnest about our gear and how we use it. Andy is warmly enthusiastic and positive about the art and practice of photography. He pulled out his Q7 and let me look at some of the work he’d created on it, and I was immediately struck by the overall quality of the images, not necessarily because of the camera, but because of the artist using it. As happens too often in my case, I began to think I should pick up a copy, but in the end I passed on the opportunity; I’d brought one of my E-M5s and an E-M10 (which I used that night) with me to Japan, along with a motley collection of lenses. I spent so much time working those two weeks in Tokyo I barely had time to get out and to use the E-M10, let alone both.

Andy is the third person I’ve met face-to-face that I’ve first met on line via my interest in photography[1]. The second is Matthew Robertson, he of Thew’s Review fame. I and my wife motored through the north eastern US up to Toronto back in 2012 to meet Matthew and his lovely wife. We had a wonderful time in Toronto (and everywhere else we stopped). Although Andy and I only had a few hours to visit with one another, I found Andy to be like Matthew in a number of key qualities; bright, enthusiastic, artistic, with a deep love of photography. All that and the fact I had to travel a long way from home to meet both. In both cases I certainly didn’t mind at all.

[1] The first person, Jim Thompson, actually lives locally here in Orlando, but originally hales from England. His wife is originally from Brazil. And he has the same temperament as Matthew and Andy.