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….

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.

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.

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.

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.