If you can’t laugh at yourself…..

 

So we went rollerskating at Tokyo Dome, with some friends. It seems to me that the younger or more female you are, the better you’ll take to life on 8 wheels.  Granted, some of the skaters were hardly in the prime of life, but then they had been skating champions in their youth.

My performance of Swan Lake was therefore nothing short of a cataclysmic artistic interpretation. The wall & I became firm friends. It is slightly more tricky I suppose, when you have ¥¥¥ of camera gear hanging around your neck.

 

The Main Event

If you live in Tokyo, the impending Tokyo Marathon is just around the corner. It’s a great opportunity to get out in the streets and shoot some pictures. The route passes through quite a wide selection of neighbourhoods, though with a little planning, you can usually get to several different spots during the course of the race. What I generally do, is pre-ride the course, in the week leading up to the event. I’m a big fan of cycling in Tokyo, and usually bike between shooting spots on the day.

As far as equipment goes, I like to pack light. One tele lens, one wide lens, 2 bodies, and a flash. And nothing very extreme either, in terms of the telephoto lens. A lot of people I talk to seem to form the impression that sports photography is always about huge telephoto lenses. I shot the image below on a 180mm lens:

I used a teleconverter with this shot, so the 180mm lens with 1.4x converter about equivalent to a 250mm lens. Adding the crop factor of the DX format camera, about a 375mm in fullframe. The disadvantages are, the AF slows down because of the reduced light into the camera, and the image quality is compromised. With top flight AFS prime lenses, the converter isn’t perhaps so much of a problem, however for the older ‘screwdrive’ lenses I really can’t recommend it.

The Tokyo Marathon bears like every other large city marathon, a number of fancy dress runners. Our Lord Jesus, for example:

Then there’s the Salaryman, every Disney, anime, and cosplay character you can think of,  the list is endless. All richly entertaining, given the often inclement weather.

I’ll be shooting from around sunrise till noon, and you’re welcome to join me if you have a bike to get around on; I’ve got a job to shoot in the afternoon, at the Russian Embassy, so I hope not to get too dishevelled in the morning!

Pinhole Fun.

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I picked up an inexpensive gadget for my Nikon: a pinhole lens. I had intended to use this for a wedding that I was shooting, but the couple decided they didn’t have time to pose in a local park. A great shame. I had pretty much forgotten about this lens, until an acquaintance of mine, English photographer Alfie Goodrich, announced a workshop based around pinhole photography.

What makes a pinhole lens special? Let’s see – it’s taking a trip back in time to the tenth century, recreating those early imaging techniques but with the added value of being able to see the recorded image right away. Stripping cameras back to their bare essentials – and dealing with the problems early photographers faced – long exposure times and images that suffered from poor quality lenses. Wearing the hair shirt, if you like. A little bit of adversity goes a long way.

So I’ve been shooting with my Kenko Pinhole Lens (details in Japanese here)http://www.2dachsies.com/2dachsies.com/Pinhole.html#9

You don’t need to be able to read Japanese to see that this little beauty has an aperture of F250!! – and a field of view approximately equivalent to a 50mm Lens.  Here in the first shot I’m on a 2 second exposure, so holding the camera on the ground kind of makes sense:

Today I took a bike ride to Nakano-ku, and cruising along route 318, got the shot below. Exposure 1/6 second, handheld and riding at about 10km/hour. I’m having a lot of fun with pinhole!