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Street Style II
The lovely Beckz. Shot on and around the streets of Jiyugaoka and inside of the delicious Sweets Forest and Spoon Bread Cafe because she graduated pastry school, so naturally we had to hit up some cake shops.
Street Style I
A few shots of the lovely Maya taken last week in Tokyo... I really want this lens, but for the time being I'm shooting with this and this. Oh, and this for the catchlights.
Kichijoji
I debated for a while whether to title this a Sky Worship post or not, but in the end decided that it wasn't focused enough to merit the title. Actually, there's not much to this post in general. I stopped by Kichijoji the other day, one of my favourite neighborhoods in Tokyo to take a few photos with a friend. This random smattering of pictures is the result.
Tokyo B&W
I woke up at 5:20 AM this morning and decided to take the day off to attend to the huge pile of things I had to do that have built up over the past month. I started out making some pretty decent progress but then when lunch rolled around I took a break to surf the net whilst stuffing my face and sort of lost my momentum. One of the things I've been meaning to do is update the blog, and so here I am, trying to regain my motivation to churn though the list of things for today. I spent a few minutes trying to think of what to write about, but nothing particular came to my mind. So instead, I decided to clear out a bunch of B&W photos I had laying around from various places in Tokyo. I don't like to mix them in with colour photos, so they sit and wait for posts like this where I can clear them out in one go.
Daikanyama Blue Skies - Sky Worship VIII
It's been a while since we've had a good Sky Worship post, hasn't it? Besides Harajuku, Daikanyama has got to be one of my favourite little neighborhoods in Tokyo. I actually posted a few photos of the area last year, but it occurred to me that it probably deserved its own sky-themed post as well. In addition to all the great boutiques and cafes that line its streets, Daikanyama features (much like ura-harajuku) a ton of fantastic white buildings that look stunning against those blue blue skies of Tokyo that I love so much.
Tamachi Skate Park
It was beautiful weather last weekend (rare, given how freezing it's been this winter) and to take advantage of the opportunity mother nature had seen fit to bless us with, a friend and I grabbed our cameras and headed over to the Tamachi neighborhood of Tokyo to snap a few shops of some skater boys doing their thing at the local skateboard park.
Quiet streets
My mind ended up turning to thoughts about my blog, life and future these days (not necessarily in that order, mind you). It's been almost 7 years since I moved to Japan and I thought that by now I'd know what I want to do with my life. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case. I think the core issue is that I'm a fickle panda: this is a blessing in that I have many and multi-varied interests, but also a curse because I tire of things quickly. Every time I think I have found something I want to do with my life, three weeks later I decide it's not really for me and I stop working towards it.
Akihabara-Ochanomizu Pt. I
And while I have been to both places quite a few times (the former because I have an obsession with cameras (like this one, for example), and the latter for business), I had actually never walked between them - which seems a shame, given that they are located right next to each other. Plus, in most big cities, the most interesting spots are not necessarily those right in front of the major train stations (since that landscape tends to be dominated by the same homogenous chain stores that can afford the pricey real estate), but rather in the areas just outside or between the "station zones."
2009 Year in Pictures
2009 was a pretty great year (well for me personally. For the world and the economy, err, not so much) and it was hard to choose just a few pictures as my "favourites" from the thousands that I snapped over the past 12 months. On top of that, there's the question of how to sort them? While all the pictures could be classified dozens of different ways, in the end I decided to go with the four basic themes below. (if you need more granularity than that, head over to the photos section of the site and play around with the search options!)
A few from Tuesday
It was gorgeous autumn weather out last Tuesday, and there are few better places to take advantage of it than the myriad of cafes lining the winding streets between Shibuya and Daikanyama. Thus my spiffy new $14 puffar vest and I headed over to see how much caffeine I could cram down my throat. I managed 8 cups of espresso in various forms over the course of 12 hours, though I stopped being able to hold the camera steady long before that....It was, in every way, a wonderful day.
Ura-Harajuku Part I
But for now, something a little bit different. There are a lot of fun places to see in Tokyo (one of the reasons I like it so much) - some more familiar to Westerners than others. One of the neighborhoods that got a lot of attention back in the states a few years back (thanks to Gwen Steffani, I suppose) is Harajuku. I happen to like Harajuku quite a bit as it packs a lot of interesting stuff, but sometimes people only scratch the surface - i.e. the two main drags of Ometesando-dori and Takeshita-dori - of what it has to offer. Those places are quite nice in and of themselves and you could do worse than to spend some time (and money) walking down them. However, in my opinion, it's the back streets of Harajuku - known as "Uraharajuku" (or "Urahara" for short) that are far more interesting than the more commonly visited Takeshita and Omotesando streets. In addition to countless hip clothing stores (a veritable paradise for a tragic fashion victim such as myself and a prime reason why I'm perpetually broke), this area also features some pretty great cafes, and is inhabited by some of the trendiest cats around, if you're into people watching.
Yokohama Birthday Bash - Part I
It was my birthday the other day, and slightly depressed over slowly inching towards "old old panda" status (not yet, but it's coming...), I decided to go to Yokohama with some friends to celebrate and take my mind off the ever-present press of time. As frequent readers of the pandablog may know, I love roller coasters with a passion. I've been to most of the big ones in Japan, but for some reason hadn't been to Cosmo World in Yokohama yet. So that's where we went, followed by a delicious all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in the neighboring Chinatown.
570 Days of Summer - Sky Worship VII
The reason I even decided to calculate how many days of summer I've spent in these fair isles is that recently we've been having some absolutely kick ass summer weather in Tokyo (seriously, the skies have been ridiculously beautiful) and as I headed out the door to snap some pictures from the top of the Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills (one of my favourite photography spots) on a particularly fantastic - albeit sweltering - summer day, it struck me that this year I've been a lot more active this summer than in all the other summers past combined.