The reason for the trip to Japan a few weeks back was to aid Thai students in building robots, so I'll share some photos from that.







It feels... superficial somehow to make this comment, but the Thai students were so damn cute. Their full Thai names were very long and basically impossible for us to pronounce so they all had rather charming single-syllable nicknames. This coupled with the fact that each student had a very distinct personality accentuated by his or her style of dress just made them downright adorable.



Perhaps it was because I was only teaching them for a week, and the instructor-to-student ratio was about five times what I am used to, but the Thai students were also a lot more fun to teach than those back in the States.




Snapped this photo in a huge, four-or-five-story electronics store. One floor was dedicated to cameras, other ones had kitchen appliances (the largest number of externally separate drawers/compartments I saw in a refrigerator? 5.) and TVs and probably gaming systems too. We didn't explore all the floors...




A 7-11.. sort of.




As our time in Fukuoka was winding down we took a bus tour around the city. We went to this temple where I ran out of film about three photos inside the gate, but it was just as well because we had about fifteen minutes before we headed out, and shooting film tends to slow me down. There were some weird things about that experience, but I'm tired and it's a story for another time.






You have all seen My Neighbor Totoro, yes? I highly recommend it.

This trip happened right after I got back from Pittsburgh, so the Rollei roll I posted already of Pittsburgh had these on the tail end. During this trip I saw the most beautiful sunset I have ever experienced, but, hilariously, the only camera with film in it by that point was the disposable "picture yourself at Pitt" thing that Lolo gave me. Those photos are around here somewhere...

You may have noticed that there are a number of self-portraits amongst my Japan photos...

It seems that I have this sort of habit, or ritual, when traveling. I take a lot of photos of myself... Often these are during solo wanderings. Perhaps then it's a way of capturing the moments of my trip in a more meaningful way? Not so much as proof, but more a reminder that, hey, there I was.

Looking back over my Pittsburgh photos most of the self-portrait shots were reflections in things, my face mostly hidden behind my camera. In Japan I took a slightly different approach. I have about a 6-inch tall bendy-legged tripod deal that I can screw onto my camera, and while it's not the real deal it's usually sufficient as long as I can find something to rest it on (either that or get a good angle shooting from the ground). Japan found me inspired to take a bunch of self portraits using this little tripod and the newly-found self-timer on my camera.










...It’s been an interesting couple of years in college. Something that’s been missing (and missed) in my life is the lack of artistic presence. Let me explain. Not all of it is gone; I still see, and am greatly inspired by, the great works of friends and strangers in faraway places, beamed to me through the lightspeed of the internet. But there’s not been the personal presence of other artists very much.

I see the photos from adventures my friend has been on with her boyfriend, see her photos of him taking photos and his reciprocal photos of her... And I’m a bit jealous and mostly curious.. What is it like to have someone around that understands (at least some things, on some level)? Again, some explanation: One of my bigger issues in Japan was that I was traveling with two crusty older engineers, who seemed to always be furrowing brows and piling pent-up grouchiness at all my youthful dilly-dallying: in stores, while taking photos, etc. I got some good practice with snapping quick shots and doing lightning-speed lens changes, but I’m sure I missed some subtler pictures.

I think it’s developed my photo style though, as evidenced in these. They seem to perfectly capture the sense of artistic isolation I felt in Japan, and at large while pursuing my engineering degree.






Isolation is somewhat of a negative word in our extroverted culture, but it’s not all bad. Have you ever been on a photo-taking adventure with someone and you both end up stopping and taking photos of the same thing (by virtue of the fact that when one person has stopped the procession the other person naturally starts looking around for things to photograph, and often ends up deeming interesting the same subject that photographer #1 initially stopped for)? Yeah there was little-to-none of that in this experience. Which marks a trend of personal inspiration that’s been different than what I am used to, and I think it’s evolved me in a different direction than I would have gone otherwise. I guess I’m saying that my creative box has had very few directly artistic inputs over the past four or five years, so inspiration has come from different places (philosophy classes, engineering theory, even.. engineers (who’d have thought)).

..Which is nice to think about. I thought I’d just stagnated. I guess nothing really stands still though.







I couldn't decide which one to choose so I'm submitting you to all three.

Pretty sure I had this photo from ileum in mind (among other things) when desiring to shoot the above.




Remember the post from Japan where I remarked about the vending machines? It really was odd for me to see (or rather, for my eyes to be assaulted by) the contrast between the dark streets and the bright white vending machines. I wish I would have taken more photos of them.






I got some good stares from some high school boys while taking this photo.

Some purses I made a while back. This first one was for a friend of mine, and you can see her fine self modeling it in the last couple pictures. The second one is mine and it took quite a beating when I used it to haul my camera stuff around in Japan so I figured I'd document it before it totally falls apart.



















The two purses were made from the same pattern (which I made using a purse that a friend of mine had, the shape of which I really liked) so they're quite similar. Both have a small internal pocket and a larger side pocket/space that can be snapped closed.





Overall I think these turned out well, though I'm still looking for a better way to hide the ends of the zipper that fold into the bag, because they're pretty visible when it's unzipped. And I need to remember to put interfacing in with the snaps; I barely use the snaps in my bag because I'm paranoid they will rip through the thin lining fabric. Mmm, yep. I think that's about it.

Some initial photos from the Japan trip a few weeks ago.






Straight off the plane we went to this place in Fukuoka called Canal City. I don't know if that was the name of the district or what but there was a huge mall there and that's where we went.



Do you ever sit there for what feel like forever trying to color balance something? You're there and sliding the slider one way, then the other. Clicking different states on the history tab trying to figure out if you're making it worse or better until you look away from the screen and the whole room looks an odd color because you have brought your mind to weird and bad places with all the obsessing? And then you realize that for all your blabbering about the joys of analog photography and darkroom enlargements if you ever tried for color print processing it would fucking eat you alive? Yeah, that.



Also no matter what way I rotated this it always seemed to be calling for me to rotate it another 90 degrees.

So. Those flowers were in Japan. I know I know why take photos of flowers in Japan that look just like flowers in the States? Well because when I look back at the photo I remember taking it. The end picture is the key to this little pocket of memory in my brain and in the pocket are my thoughts and feelings at the moment of shutter click. I was sitting near the pond at the university with my fellow instructors/traveling partners during a break between teaching sessions and I busted out my camera in an effort to not let myself get lazy with photo-taking (because after all Maria you are in Japan you should be capturing everything right) and these flowers were teeny tiny and I had to get really close with my lens and one of the traveling buddies remarked that 'Oh look Maria's taking a picture of her crotch' and I half ignored it as a comment on par for the course and half pondered (half-jokingly?) on the remarkable lack of artistic sensitivity from my fellow engineers. And that's what happened in that moment.




The nice manager man for the dorms I was staying in seemed to be pretty disappointed at my complete lack of any sort of Japanese knowledge so he tried to teach me a couple of words.





This is a community garden in the neighborhood around the university.




The solution to narrow streets and low visibility. We went tearing down these small neighborhood streets in a car a few times and it was pretty scaryexciting. On the plus side, giant SUVs were rarely seen.






These last views are from one of the buildings in the university I was TAing at.