Japanese festival edition.

Little did I know that Boston holds a yearly festival of Japanese culture.

Now for a sort of Euro/American person, I eat a lot of sushi and I really like it.  In fact, my entire family eats a lot of sushi.  Considering we all originally hail from a land where food is cooked so thoroughly that the flavor of it is effectively gone, eating sushi is kind of unexpected.  I’d go even further and say that when I see uncooked fish, I just want to keep it that way.  Cooking, in my opinion, ruins it.

Well, anyway, I know that Japanese culture consists of lots more than just uncooked fish.  It would be small minded of me to distill a thousand year old culture into just a preference for fish, the uncooked kind.

What has really intrigued me over the years about Japanese culture is the fact that they are so good at melding things.  They take one thing from one place, put it together with something Japanese and create a whole other thing.  One book that I have taken a lot of inspiration from in my photos is one called Strange Fruits, which documented the street style of the Japanese people.  Mind you this was a book that came out about 15 years ago, way before street style was even a thing that people looked at, paid attention to, or was relentlessly documented on every blog from here to the end of the earth.

The Japanese did street style first and I’d say best.

Let’s have a look at the styles found at the Japanese festival.

Some where VERY traditional:

 

 

 

Yet others added embellishments to their costumes:

 

 

 

 

But then we get to what I love about Japanese and Japanese influenced style.  A little of the normal.  And a little of the abnormal:

 

 

 

The fact that I chronicle Downtown Crossing is purely accidental.  Four years ago, I choose a place to work in this area, based solely on the fact that it was close to South Station.  I had visited the area just a few times before that and once as a teenager.  I couldn’t have imagined that one day it would become where I worked and in a lot of ways the inspiration for the photographs I take.

On its surface, Downtown Crossing is just about the most uninspiring place on earth.  Its just a bunch of streets intertwined in an almost sensible pattern, nearly unheard of in Boston.  There are stores and businesses there but its not Fifth Avenue or Union Square or any of the other famous thoroughfares in the world.

But when you take a closer look, it becomes so much more interesting.  A lot of the buildings are very old and when you walk by them you notice new details about them every time.  There are two other great things about the place.  There are a lot of straight lines and clear places to shoot where you are unobstructed.  And the light is magnificent at times.  Just out of this world, creating patterns of shadows that never cease to amaze me.  Sometimes when I am on my way to work, I have to stop myself from taking photos of every shadow around, because I’ve done them before.  Sometimes, I just don’t.

One of my favorite movies of all time is a movie called “Smoke” with Harvey Keitel and William Hurt.  It revolves around a smoke shop in Brooklyn.  Harvey Keitel plays the owner of the aforementioned smoke shop and he has a Canon AE-1 that he shoots pictures of the passerby’s of the store every single day, 365 days a year.  I feel like that sometimes.  I feel like I’m this person who just shoots Downtown Crossing in all of its moods, feelings and incarnations.

Oh yeah, so after this long explanation, some recent photos of my “muse”:

Actually it just lined up this way:

 

 

 

Ever since I was a kid, I would walk down the street and look at houses and kind of imagine the lives of the people who lived there.  Not exactly the people, but try to guess from the outside of the house what kind of people lived there and what they did.  I used to think that a pretty house meant better people lived there, but I’ve gotten rid of that idea after a while.

Cayman was full of these little houses, modest and not modest.  Being in a foreign country gives that kind of imagining another element.  You start to imagine what it would be like to live there, all the time.  Hence I guess why I like to photograph that kind of thing so much:

Just over two weeks ago, I stepped off the plane in the Island of Cayman and experienced this weird thing called heat.  I don’t mean artificial heat that is supplied by a heater, but actual outdoor heat.  Needless to say that after two blizzards, bitingly cold days and a trip to a summit where the temperate was a tropical -40F, I was pretty happy to feel this.

Warm temperatures means warm ocean means creatures in that warm sea.  I have to say, I love the sea and snorkeling in it.  It is like swimming with views.  Swimming is so boring sometimes, but swimming with views, well, that is much better.  And these were some amazing views:

Well, not actually, but the internet was so slow in the Caymans that I decided to do my blog posts once I reached the mainland.

Boston is as I left it.  Cold, rainy and full of rats.  I love my city!!!  Really I do, but once in a while, I must leave.

And see this:

 

Yes, reappearing for a second year on my blog are the legendary Cayman Island stingrays of Stingray City.  They also made a famous photo bombing appearance last year:

 

No, I did not take this photo and I didn’t really understand it, since the stingray is about as dangerous as your average blanket.

As I said before, these animals kind of feel like wet mushrooms.  I’m not afraid of them, but I’m not generally a fan of slimy things.  It just a thing I have.  However, photographing those sweethearts is no problem:

 

This was early morning stingrays, so there were lots of early morning sea shots: