_valerian

Since Tokyo is immensely walkable and winter weather here is a fantastic mixture of bearable temperatures and softly filtered southern sunlight I’ve been making the most of any available time to getting my feet to pavement and the emulsified side of film exposed correctly through a lens.

On December 30th I walked a few hours from Shinjuku to Kitasenju a feat (feet?) which broke my previous distance record or at least came to a close second place behind a walk from the Tama river along the Odakyu line to Shinjuku in 2002. The key is to start somewhere South West and head North East so that you’ll have the sun on your back which makes for better pictures and keeps you warm.

Today I met up with Onishi Sensei at Kawaguchi station in Saitama and we meandered for a few hours amongst the older factory parts of town that still remain. All the new condo towers means you can’t help but make one of those inevitable “Old & New” kinds of pictures:

Which admittedly isn’t exactly the most interesting photo to make, but the better ones with folks on the street are currently latent images on a few rolls of Fuji Presto in my fridge.

Eventually we ended across the Arakawa river and down into Akabane’s amazing little shopping / nightlife street district. It’s common (and understandable) to get caught up in the idea that the only places to make Good Photographs are in the usual places around the Yamanote line but spots like Kawaguchi, Matsudo, Machida, Ichikawa, Funabashi, Urayasu, etc are well worth the train fare to go visit and poke around in with a camera. That’s one of my goals for the next year- stick to the outer edges of Tokyo: Tabata, Machiya, Minami and Kita-Senju, Oshiage, Hikufune and so on. Man, I haven’t been in Shibuya for months and this is a fact which pleases me greatly.