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.
Very very cool! I like a ton of these and I'm glad you documented all those little moments. That's how I remember stuff too. :)
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