As I am still saving up money and courage to buy a new camera I’ll make a few more posts about Hakodate with the last photos that my old canon 5D took before it met its end on an icy asphalt road one fateful day in January.
I don’t know how most people operate when they do street photography, but I need to immerse myself in a weird state of observing the city as a flow of aesthetically meaningful symbols, disregarding particular details or physical properties of the landscape. Contrary to what you might expect from a person processing data from the outside world, my favorite pictures are taken in a complete dispersal of attention and lack of acute visual focus due to an ongoing introverted search for references and meanings. Does that gas station remind me of some movie set in Detroit that I watched back in 2015?.. Wait, that street’s width and buildings’ heights proportion is so typical for small towns in southern Russia. But this courtyard looks a bit like Italy. Aren’t these rusty window shutters colored exactly like the front gate at my grandparents’ house? To me Hakodate became the most photogenic city in Japan because of the amount of references at every corner that I could decipher and appreciate with my past experiences of living in Russia and Europe. No wonder I completely zoned out and slipped on an icy slope with my camera at some point. "I was looking for the great beauty" and I guess I found it.
April is the most hectic month in Japan — the start of the academic and fiscal years, new anime season, everyone’s moving houses, cities, changing jobs, entering or graduating schools/universities. And whoever is not busy with the above-mentioned mundanities is most likely traveling around the country to appreciate (=take tons of pictures of) sakura in full bloom. This year foreign tourists couldn’t join the race, but because of that Kyoto was swarmed by domestic visitors who were naive enough to think they would avoid the usual crowds this way. The flowers were still breathtaking and I borrowed my good friend’s little Fuji XT30 to capture it for you in between several hardcore deadlines. Can’t believe that my fourth year in Japan just began.
Came across two rare sights on Giontatsumi bridge: a majestic heron resting in the middle of the city and a geiko not running away from cameras. + Tons of sakura as a bonus.