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Dave Bellard's not-so-daily journal and sketchbook 

Tokyo, Japan: Medium Format Film Scans

 

New month, new blog post: a few scans of medium format film I shot in Tokyo in 2017. I put the developed film away after getting it processed and I wasn’t sure if I would even use it in artwork. I hadn’t even looked at it closely when it came back from Dwayne’s Photo. Fast forward to a few months ago, I was sorting all my recent film and found these again and after a closer look, I decided to use for new pieces in the Hexagon Derivative style. I made some hi-res scans of the originals before I cut them up….

SHIBUYA STATION ENTRANCE, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

SHIBUYA STATION ENTRANCE, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

I don’t usually post scans of the “raw” film I use in compositions, mainly because the shots I take are overexposed or framed weird to suit a particular way I want to use them in the final piece. Most of them wouldn’t really work if I tried to present them to viewed as completed photos. However I was happy with the level of detail in many of these photos from Tokyo, enough that I thought they warranted a look here on the blog.

SHIBUYA, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

SHIBUYA, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

There’s nothing particularly “notable” about these shots. Like all of my urban photographs, I took a very documentary approach to shooting film in Tokyo - no artistic framing, low angles, or abstract images - just a straight look at the city as I was seeing it.

UENO, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

UENO, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

Tokyo in the daylight is flat. Clean and colorful, but as banal as a pop song. It comes through in the shots, giving the viewer an un-enhanced birds-eye view of the city. It’s like Google street view on film.

AKIHABARA, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

AKIHABARA, TOKYO, 2017 • DAVID BELLARD (click below to see details)

I shot two or three rolls of medium-format Provia transparency film in Shibuya, Ueno and Akihabara, using my Fujica GM690 with a 65mm lens - which ironically was purchased a few years previously from an Ebay seller in Japan. These are the most interesting views from those rolls, and I ended up using most of these in the compositions, which I’ll be posting on the website soon.

SHIBUYA CROSSING, TOKYO, 2017

SHIBUYA CROSSING, TOKYO, 2017

SHIBUYA, TOKYO, 2017

SHIBUYA, TOKYO, 2017

 
 
David Bellard