Today is the 150th birthday of Big Ben. I am aware that Big Ben is the bell rather than the building surrounding it, but you can look at the photos and imagine the bell nonetheless! These pictures were taken a couple of years ago when Britain was having a terrible summer of almost constant rain. Just happened that the weekend I was in London was glorious weather. Hoorah!
During May and June dragon boat races are held across Okinawa with fierce competition between local towns. I would love to take photos from inside the boat during a race, but for now this shot is my favorite.
In today’s Ryukyu Shimpo (one of the newspapers in Okinawa) there was a short piece about my exhibition at Cotonoha. It’s a bit of a shame that it was published when my exhibition is only up for another couple of days, but better later than never. I’m going to be hanging out at Cotonoha Saturday and Sunday afternoon, so if you are in the area drop by and say hello (or konichiwa).
The Turin Shroud: How da Vinci Fooled History was lent to me on my last photo trip so I had something to read on the train. The book is the research about how Picknett and Prince came to the conclusion that the Turin Shroud was not just a forgery ( as previously shown by carbon dating ) but that it was a primitive photograph created by Leonardo da Vinci. Most of the book is not particularly well written and was a bit of a struggle to get through. They go into detail about the history of the shroud, and the various different theories regarding its creation. The book did become interesting in the penultimate chapter when they describe how they tried to create a similar shroud image using techniques da Vinci (in their opinion a skilled chemist, artist, physician, physicist, and heretic) may have used. Their process involved producing a simple camera obscura with a primitive lens to project an image onto a piece of white linen. The authors thought da Vinci even used a model …
It turns out that Britain had a series of secret bunkers for use in the event of a nuclear attack. (Just like in Terminator 3) But how do you find your nearest top secret bunker…. Photograph taken by my dad. I now suspect he is working for the KGB.
Pentax has launched a new top of the range camera, the K-7. The photography press calls it a flagship model, but it is a title that will be short lived, as the Pentax 645 digital is due to be released next year. It is an impressive camera, that will probably beat similar priced Nikon and Canon cameras in most respects. The K-7 is not however a full frame camera as some Pentaxians had hoped, but the Pentax 645 should fill the niche of Pentax photographers who want more than an APS sized sensor. The K-7 also joins the ranks of digital SLRs that can record high definition video. Like other SLRs I believe you will have to manual focus while shooting video, but it should allow you to film with a shallow depth of field much like you see in movies, something that is difficult to do with regular consumer video cameras. The price quoted in the British Journal of Photography was 1200 pounds. On the Yodobashi.com website the price is 129,000 yen (you can …
Here are a few photographs of my exhibition at Cotonoha for those of you who live on the other side of the world.
If you’ve seen the movie Apocalypto you will be well aware that a solar eclipse can be a life changing experience. On July 22nd 2009 there will be a total solar eclipse visible from a narrow band across Asia and the Pacific. From Wikipedia: “This solar eclipse is the longest total solar eclipse that will occur in the twenty-first century, and will not be surpassed in duration until June 13, 2132. Totality will last for up to 6 minutes and 39 seconds, with the maximum eclipse occurring in the ocean at 02:35:21 UTC about 100 km south of the Bonin Islands, southeast of Japan. The North Iwo Jima island is the landmass with totality time closest to maximum.” This map shows its progress across southern Japan. The main island of Okinawa is in the 90% eclipse zone. Most of the Japanese islands in the total eclipse area are tiny. The island of Yakushima however is a little larger and still in the zone of totality. There is access by plane and ferry from Kagoshima, but tickets are either gone or …
The Stripes Okinawa, is the free weekly supplement of the Stars and Stripes newspaper. Kluso (the musician in an earlier blog post) does some writing for the paper and came down to Cotonoha to chat about the exhibition. Kluso’s article along with some of my photographs appeared today in this week’s edition.
Yesterday I was a guest on Arisa Muto‘s chat show on FM Okinawa. We talked in Japanese about topics ranging from how blue the sky is to my favorite Okinawan food. It will be broadcast on May 23rd at 9.30pm, and if you’d like to hear me butchering the Japanese language it will definitely be worth tuning in to. I had never been into a recording studio before. I was most impressed by the doors.
