Blog

The photographic blog of Sean Wood (aka motionid)

Skytree

This must have been taken more than a year ago now. Just before Skytree opened. I've not been up. I have found the area to be completely uninteresting - except a small shrine located quite near that has a bit of atmosphere and personality. The mall next to Skytree was nothing special. Same old stores in a different location. I'm sure the view is good if you actually go up. Love the little plane in the shot. Which is the main reason for posting it.

website makeover

It's been too long coming. I've finally gotten around to redoing the 50mm site. In theory I should have had the blog and the site run from the same installation of Wordpress but that would just take up too much of my time.The new site is slowly coming together and with it a review on what goes on there and what should be going on the blog. You might find a few thing's missing from the new site. If that's the case start looking for them on the blog. Which means that I'm likely going to post a lot of old stuff up here in the near future. Some of which has not seen the light of day and should I guess (bit of a waste otherwise). The new site is nothing special but, being a designer, it took me ages to find a balance between functionality and simplicity. That and I kept changing my mind every five minutes so I guess that doesn't help. There will be a style issue between the blog and the new site. Something I will need to work on over time to bring into alignment. I've gone for a responsive design this time around which means it should work on devices other than a computer. One issue I have discovered, however, is the ipad 3 is causing issues regarding file sizes. The resolution of the screen is so high I need to serve very large images so they look good. This has quite an impact on load time and is not being helped by a bug in the slideshow code that prevents the loading animation from displaying. I could work on serving up two or three versions of the images but that might have to wait until after the site is launched.

Stay tuned.

The Wedge

This building is around the corner from my office. After seeing the result I went out and tried to shoot it square without success. The format just didn't work.This was shot on the Voigtlander Bessa R2a with a 50mm @ f16 directly into the sun which is why you see the screwed b+w flare.

I like how the subject takes up the space in the frame in this shot. I also like all the textures and the exposure. Everything to me seems to have the right balance. The clouds, the flare elements fading into small lines on the left of the shot and the tonal balance overall.

盆踊り

Sometimes it's all about the atmosphere. In Tokyo you need a real reason to shoot colour and unless you're shooting in the outskirts, the place just looks ugly during the day. Which is why I've been itching to shoot a few festivals. Obon is that little splash of colour in the year that makes it enjoyable to shoot at night again in Tokyo. And along with this comes the festive spirit which always seems to contrast drastically with the day to day tension of the city.

Salaried man

This has to be one of the best shot's I've taken in a long while. I'd developed it a few months ago and had left it jammed in my Annie Leibovitz book to flatten out (you gotta maximize the value from those expensive books). I'd finally managed to get a few new rolls developed over the weekend and discovered several sleeves in the book I'd forgotten about.This shot popped right off the neg. It seems to have a timeless quality to it I'd like to explore more of.

Railed

ok, So I am taking some serious inspiration from Jon and posting a few of these because, more than anything, I'm liking the tones and the grain.

Station raw

Station photo fail unedited.

The Chair series

Took the same train to work for two years and started to notice the different thing's people did while seated in a chair that seemed to be quite out of the way of any trains. What I like about the collect is the randomly different thing's most people are doing at any one time. The series has only been edited to keep the basic format the same (seems I shot more using 35mm than asselblad 120).

Salary man

I was about to post a similar but lesser image and realized that this shot was not in my main 50mm.jp collection. What an omission! Shot using a Voigtlander Bessa R2A I have tried to repeat this shot countless times with other cameras with no success. This image really describes how Tokyo can feel sometimes or at least feel to the locals.

Shots on a roll

If you have an monitor running 1920x1200 then open your browser to max and view th slide show.  Rather than cut these sequence of shots up I've left them how I've scanned them. When scanning 35mm I usually scan the whole strip to see what I've got and then go back and scan the ones I like at a higher resolution. The last part I never get round to doing. I just scan the strip and forget about it. I don't think any of these shots (maybe 1) have seen the light of day. I have a crap load of these. Figured this sequence was not a bad one in terms of quality vs number of shots taken.

Questions, comments and feedback are always welcome.

Tokyo stations at night - cont.

Taking a break for medium format I went back to shoot with the rangefinder for a while. These shots are a mix of 35mm and 50mm all shot at night in various locations but on the subway and the JR.