Archive | August, 2010

Awa Odori in Yamato

By on August 27, 2010 in japan, Photography

I’m a little backlogged on my festival updates, which was partially due to a lack of hard drive space for video footage but now I have yet another chunk of plastic to store data (this one is 1.5 TB, so it should keep me going for a while).

Anyway, I finally met up with Jesslee, a long-time Flickr contact and a super photographer (and a really nice guy) and we went to Awa Odori in Yamato, Kanagawa on July 25. I’ve blogged about Awa Odori before, so I won’t go into too much detail. Instead, I’ll just do more of a visual post.

You can find out more about the history of Awa Odori if you visit the Wikipedia page, but it focuses mainly on the big one in Tokushima, the birthplace of Awa Odori, when, in fact, you can see it performed all over Japan throughout the month of August (and there is a huge one in Koenji at the end of August each year).

So, on to the photos…I seemed to be in a cross-processing mood when I did these, so most of them have a kind of 1974 look to them (which I like) and, by the way, that cross-processing link has a good Photoshop tutorial (which I did not use for these photos but have used in the past).

Before the photos though, here is a short video of one of the Ren (連) performing at Yamato (“ren” means tribe or group and each dance team is called a “ren”, for example a group might be called Shimbashi Ren or Shinobu Ren, etc.) – this was shot with the Canon iVIS HF21:

Some photos:

This one (above) is probably my favourite of the evening…

I love the spectator in the lower right corner here:

The fan with the two faces caught my eye here:

A young festival-goer – he got really excited when the dancing started and was dancing too:

And, finally, Jesslee down low and checking his settings – no, really, he is NOT chimping…!
(I love the figure on the right in the background, so I kept this in colour – the black and white version doesn’t really reveal the blurred ren member):

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Tokyo Sky Tree is Rising

By on August 20, 2010 in japan

Soooo…I’ve been on holiday for a bit and you’d think that would mean that I’d have more time for blog posts, etc., but what it’s actually meant is that I have not been spending much time on my computer at all (even my Tweets are few and far between the past several days). This is,of course, a good thing because it means that I actually am on holiday!

What have I been doing? Well, the main focus has been going to matsuri and shooting people (with a camera). Other than that, I have been doing quite a bit of reading and just enjoying my free time.

What I have also been doing is watching the Tokyo Sky Tree grow – it is, at the same time, both a fast and a slow process. I know that makes no sense, but it’s slow in the sense that it won’t officially open until 2012 and it’s fast in the sense that I occasionally look off the balcony and think: “wow, it’s really progressing in height…”.

I took this last week:

Tokyo Sky Tree in August, 2010

They are about half way to the second observatory, so I’d say that they are at about the 400 metre mark (with another couple of hundred metres to go and a final height of 643 m).

Well, actually, I’ve just checked the official Japanese site, where they post the official progress, and they are at 418 m! (I didn’t know they were posting a height tracker – that’s pretty cool.)

Yes, matsuri pictures coming soon…

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