Sorry I haven’t updated you on my photo work of late. If you have been following my Instagram, though, you’d know everything! – 2018 was a crazy year for me. I put a hold on my day job in Melbourne and traveled quite a bit.
In February, I was first in Bangkok, walking around Chinatown in the middle of Lunar New Year action. Great food, quite part of town, catching up with friends, meeting great minds at guesthouses and on the road. It was a start of great many things.
I just came back from the Philippines where I spent wonderful fortnight. A few days before the trip, I saw a post on Facebook stream by a friend of mine. Kazu was saying that he was back in Philippines again, and this time staying a little longer than usual so he’d rented a room in an apartment, with a spare couch where a friend was welcome to drop by… A quick message was met with as quick a reply to confirm it was cool to visit. I threw out the clothes and equipment onto the table and floor, and packed.
Continue reading Power of Smile Project
It’s been a long time since I last wrote on this blog. These days it is easier to just upload and share on social network. But sometimes, I’d like to share my experiences as a photographer, beyond just the image itself.
I’ve posted an article in my travel blog. You’d know it if you are following my Facebook page or Instagram, but I was in Cairo. It was an amazing experience, and I was in a wonderful place, in terms of my creative state of mind.
Yes, I am on a week holiday in Istanbul. It is a beautiful place with people with great sense of hospitality.
I’m posting some of my photos on my ‘travel blog’ as usual, so please check them out!
Istanbul posts in my travel blog
Oh, by the way, I was planning on visiting Israel next week, but due to unstable situation here it has been cancelled. I will be in Tokyo from early next week!
Last weekend, I visited Sydney. I had been to the city only once before. And that was a long time ago. Re-tracing the tracks, and trying to remember the feelings that went through me back them, I walked on the street of the unfamiliar city. The sky was blue, the ocean was almost as blue. It was a beautiful weekend.
Check out the rest of the photos on Flickr. I would also love to hear your comments.
Street photography is something I’d picked up in the last few years, as a substitute for the travel photography while I am not actually traveling. Traveling is great, being an ‘outsider’ you are free from the fear of being rejected from your territory after pointing cameras to the people on the street. But as you come to realise, you can do the same thing in your familiar city. As many street photographers, including Joel in this fantastic video, tells you, it is about getting over that fear, fear of people getting angry and coming after you for photographing them on the street. I also heard the same thing from Billy Plummer, a very talented photographer who used to teach photography in UK and now working in a creative job based in China, whom I was fortunate enough to meet when I visited my friend and his colleague in Guangzhou. He told me, ‘Yes, we all fear that. But you’ve got to go out, try it, again and again, until you realise, it’s ok to do it.’ He taught that to many of his students while he was teaching photography, and he is living it. Look at the power in his street photography, and you know he is right.
If you like street photography and want to know about what makes them what it is, how the photographers work, all that, this video on Joel Meyerowitz is fantastic. It is about 60-minute long, but it’s got so much on his approach to street photography, as well as different, more detailed images he makes with a large format view camera. As an artist, each of us goes through stages where we are attracted by something and driven to express something, communicate and send some message through the body of work, but that, whatever inspiration and driving force, may change over time. I still remember the sensation that ran through me when, for the first time in my life, I made a beautiful portrait (or more like ‘snap’ that looked like portraiture, really) which made everyone arround me cheer me on. That was 21 years ago and I made that with my first Canon SLR camera. I remember what excited me when I was photographing on the cobble streets in the sub-zero Switzerland. And I remember what excited me when I was working on an abstract / street project last year, right here on the streets of Melbourne. Through all that experience, I see things I see, the kind of things that I could not see or understand even when other people talk of it. So that’s where it comes down to – you just got to keep doing it, then you’ll see ‘the next’. While you are being smart in your couch and saying ‘that’s about as far as I go with my limited creativity’, you will never see it.
Enough about me… have a look at this video. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you like to find out more about street photography, like this video, visit In-Public, a website committed to street photography.
The video is embedded on this In-Public article.
After visiting the local printing lab a few times and putting the same photo next to each other, trying to decide which of the same two photos are better (slightly different print treatment), I mounted all the photos in beautiful off-white window mount, put in acid-free box and they went out of my work desk. Finally. During the brief presentation of my works, friends game me the thumbs-up, mentors gave me some things in my images that are working well and effective, as well as some points for improvements. After 20 odd years of my photography life, the last couple of years have seen the steepest learning curve.
Now that the projects I have been working on for the last 5 months have finally came to a close, at least for now, my head is almost filled with anticipation of what’s waiting for me around the corner as I walk down the streets of cities I’ve never visited before. I love traveling and I love the excitement of finding connection with the local people, with whom I cannot quite communicate in their language, I find connection through my manners and respect for their customs. I love it when I am accepted and allowed to photograph them. Will I be relaxed enough to maximise my photographic experience in new countries? Or will some comment from somebody who don’t like to be photographed annoy me for the duration of my trip? :p That happened to me in Cairo all those years ago and I still regret not continuing to photograph for the last few days.
Well, it’s time to get back to the basics. Breathe in, and breathe out. Focus on the breath, and connect to myself first. Be comfortable an content. Appreciate the moment. Let go. Let go of the anticipation. Let go of the expectation. Be free.
But how can I stop myself from counting down the days to my departure? 🙂
If I have regular access and feel like writing a lot, I’ll update my progress on my travel blog. If you love traveling like I do, keep your dial to that blog and throw in your comments whenever it comes to your mind. Adios heat in Melbourne! I’m off to the late autumn, and winter coat and scarf.
I was almost humming that first song of U2’s ‘All that you can’t leave behind’ album as the people smiling in the sun pass outside the window of my bus. Unfortunately my beloved B&O headphone was out of action, after having been pulled this way and that every time its cable got caught by my hand, bag, camera and while it tried to catch my phone before it hit the ground on rare occasion. So it was just the music playing in my head but it was just that kind of day. I might even go on to tell you that it might have been the most beautiful day of the year. And I was sitting in the sun on the bus heading out of my part of town, passing the hospital and university, and dropping me off near Lygon Street.
On the days when I have a good flow of creative stuff, I can feel that. I don’t know if there is actually some juice flowing in my gut somewhere, or is there a chemical content or some specific electric current running in some corner of my brain, whichever it is, I feel it, like a prediction, that ‘I have it today’.
Yusuke Tsutsui Photography - blog 