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I matted my prints today and even tore one in the process*. That was too bad but I had another print almost as good that I was able to use instead. Tomorrow afternoon I will take them to the Nikon Salon and Tuesday night I will hang the show.
A third of the way into matting my photos I ran out of the tape I needed so I headed over to Kitasenju’s Tokyu Hands shop. I love that place. I also ran into this girl.. No joke. Mayuko is a Tokyo University (Geidai) Art Student, and this was the second time I had run into her in Tokyo. The first was in Shinjuku station.

I have been getting nervous and frusterated recently over my photography. Nervous, in that I hope my show goes well, or at least people won’t be too picky about my print quality. Frusterated, over everything else. I made about 200 workprints this week and it is hard to keep in mind that there is no way that even half of those are going to be any good. And guess what 95% of them were crap, either through technical mistakes or content and form choices. I think I am getting tired of just wading through crosswalks and snapping off a lot of photographs. Here in Japan everyone is so concerned with a concrete Theme, or Project when they do photography. I see that as a limit to being able to make other good photographs. I like to shoot a lot, and then from there see what I am interested in and work from there. Maybe I will put the 35mm away and shoot more Medium Format and half frame pictures, kind of mix it up a bit**. I still don’t think that many people will take my photos seriously, which 9 out of 10 people don’t, but I am not making pictures for anyone else but me.

* I can get clumsy with things, been known to break cameras and hearts. When I break a camera the heart that is broken is mine.

** This is only about shooting film. Messing around with my little digital camera is a lot of fun and if there was a film camera that I could shoot in the same way I think I would go with that. That means I want something that will always get me a technical-good picture. Far be it for me to think that I might need yet another camera to work on this.

Today was the first day back at school in about a month. I still remembered how to tie a necktie and I “ironed” a shirt by throwing it in the dryer with a wet towel. When I was younger Summer Vacation was something I just expected and took for granted- the end of summer vacation meant in some way you were moving on, either to the next grade or becoming that much closer to graduating from college. Now that I am in the workforce I have learned just how precious a month off from one’s job can be- You don’t have to do anything or be anywhere for four weeks! We were supposed to have class tomorrow but thanks to the upcoming Typhoon, school has already been canceled.

Excellent.

Husker college football is the State Religion of Nebraska. Add in the recent wave of nationalism and militarism in America with the already established husker merchandise machine and you get posters that look like this.