Back in the 303

A memorial cross sits beneath a tree at the top of a hill leading to the Akaka Falls north of Hilo, HI.

It’s 12am and I’ve been back home from Hawaii for a good 13 hours now….

…Wait, what’s that? You didn’t even realize I was gone? I really gotta start updating this blog WAY more often than I have been lately (not that anybody really reads it anyways, hahaha)

So yes, visiting my family on the Big Island, mostly for my Grandpa (not the one I talked about in previous entries) who has been on a slippery slope health-wise of late, utilizing my dad’s vacation from work and the fact neither my mom (who’s on medical leave) and myself are currently not working. We arrived there Sunday evening and left Saturday night, a rather uneventful visit as far as trips to Hawaii go.

Photographically, it was nothing special. It’s tough to fit a week’s worth of picture taking in between trips to the doctor, the typical “omiyage” (gift) shopping and household chores, and I wish I had more to show from it than a couple of random shots, but hey… That’s the breaks.

Rainbow over Waimea, HI

よろしくな。

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day:
虹 (Niji)
“Rainbow”

An Unlikely Weapon

“If it makes you laugh,
if it makes you cry,
if it rips out your heart,
that’s a good picture.” – Eddie Adams

The Eddie Adams Workshop is a big deal (see previous blogspot). It has been since it came into existence and it’s the dream of every young photographer to one day have the words on their resumes. And yet not until tonight did I really realize what it meant to be offered such an experience.

Justin and I saw the documentary film about Eddie Adams at the Starz Film Center in Downtown Denver called “An Unlikely Weapon.”

Talk about sending me for a ride. It sent shivers down my spine, made me sick to my stomach. It made me chuckle a little, and shed a tear or two. In the end, it was a documentary, but for us it felt like so much more. At the end of the movie, we sort of looked at each other and thought “Damn.” It was eye opening, to see and hear about the actual man behind the workshop that in a few short months we were attending — a workshop so prominent it was actually featured in the documentary itself.

Adams’ persistent dedication to the art of story-telling and the toll it took on him both fascinates me and scares me. Some folks I know in the business have told me they think I would be a good war photographer. I’ve seen enough documentaries about war photographers like Adams and James Nachtwey to know there is no possible way I could do it. Never.

I’m out of things to say. There isn’t much I can say about it, other than reiterate how powerful images can be. I only hope I can live up to the expectations and the opportunity that the Eddie Adams Workshop presents I feel I might be well on my way to making it in the world of photojournalism. It’s what Eddie wanted, and it’s why the workshop exists.

Taken on my iPhone 3G

~~ EDIT (7/11/09 1:42AM MDT) ~~

So I during the documentary they talked about how Eddie Adams shot a portrait session with one roll of film of Clint Eastwood, and how iconic that photograph had become, ending up on the poster for Eastwood’s movie “Unforgiven.” So when I got home I went to turn on the TV and saw an open DVD case on top of our DVD player and it caught my eye. It was that picture, on the cover of “Unforgiven.”

Random thought.

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day:
写真術 (Shashin Jutsu)
“Photography”

One in a Hundred

New York, here I come. In October, that is.

On my second attempt in as many years, I have been accepted to one of THE best photojournalism workshops the world has to offer: The Eddie Adams Workshop.

Each year, the workshop accepts 100 photographers, 50 students and 50 professionals with less than 3 years experience, and I’m proud and honored to be among them. The instructors come from all different kinds of publications but with a few things in common. They’re all phenomenal photographers, and they work for such great publications such as Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, Getty, etc.

Some amazing photographers to have passed through the program include Lauren Greenfield (VII), Vincent Laforet, R.J. Sangosti (Denver Post), among others.

In other words, I’m in good company. Heck, even my buddy Justin Edmonds (who also has a great blog you oughta check out), a fellow alum of last year’s Sports Shooter Academy V, will be in attendance.

Words can hardly express how much I needed this great morale boost after a dismally disappointing summer that has gone from bad to… well, it’s still pretty bad.

On the up side, I’ve done a few freelance jobs for the local newspaper, The Aurora Sentinel and have been helping get the newly rebooted Denver Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) off the ground after it nearly went kaput since it officially came into being last summer.

In the meantime, just trying to stay busy. I’ll hopefully have a few decent shots from tonight’s AAJA-Denver candlelight vigil for Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two American journalists being detained in North Korea to post online here within the next day or two right now!

So until next time, よろしく！ And Happy Independence Day!

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day:
元気出して (Genki Dashite)
“Cheer up!”

Abstract Insanity

The product of a bored photographer and WAYYY too much time on my hands.

First of all, how the hell do you make a photograph involving cherries, a glass chess board, bubbles and smoke?

Second of all, why the hell would you want to in the first place?

Let me walk you through that process.

You see, in early May before classes ended for the semester, long before my trip to Japan weeks of boredom descended upon me, I had an idea. I wanted to make a photo using a cherry, without being cliche and predictable.

And, I’ll be honest, I have no freakin’ clue how the glass chess board ended up in the mix, I guess it seemed like the perfect background. It offered a nice pattern that would fade into nothing toward the back of the photograph (something I’m sad to say I didn’t quite achieve how I would have liked).

The bubbles came to me while showing a friend the portfolio website of a great photojournalist I admire, Chip Litherland.

And the smoke… well, smoke always has a way with making a photo that much more amusing. That and it gave a medium for me to shoot my “twilight blue” gelled flash through.

I also wanted to combine the hard-flash techniques of Strobist with the softer, more elegant touch of lightpainting.

The process was complicated, involving throwing together a makeshift pair of barndoors (little flaps on the sides of lights that help control the direction of the light and where it falls… and more importantly where it DOESNT fall) out of torn cardboard and black gaff tape. After that, I slaved the flash, which as I said earlier was gelled with a “twilight blue” — or rather light, pale blue — and set it up at a right angle to my camera.

I opened my camera’s shutter up on bulb and proceeded to lightpaint the cherries, using a little MagLite Mini flashlight with gaff tape wrapped about two layers deep to keep the bulb from showing up in the photo and stuffed with kleenix, in order to soften the light a little.

After lightpainting the cherries, my brother and I took up positions around the board and simultaneously blew hookah smoke and bubbles into the scene, as I remotely triggered the flash. We then repeated the process a couple times (from the smoke/bubble blowing on) for a total of 2-5 flashes per photo, in order to get a few extra bubbles and a little more density from the smoke.

And the result is as you see here. I hope you enjoyed this little venture into the insane mind of a bored photographer!

-B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day
桜ん坊 (Sakuranbou)
“Cherry/Cherries”

I Should Be In Tokyo Right Now

I should be in Tokyo right now. I should be (at this exact time) be waking up in my hotel in Ikebukuro after a night of disorienting train rides and customs checks. But I’d be there.

Instead, thanks to the bullshit disease they call “Swine Flu” I and a few friends who were supposed to be teaching English in Yamagata are state-side and trying to cope… No internships, no jobs.

So in honor of what I SHOULD be doing now, here’s a nice little Pros and Cons list of being home instead of halfway around the world (Note: I did NOT steal this idea from Andrew, he stole the idea from me! He just had internet first….)

Pros:
- No pre-travel stress (especially going abroad for the first time, and alone nonetheless!)
- Saving all my Yen for a Graduation present trip to Japan (that my parents said I can do since I won’t be going this year)
- I get to spend time with great ppl like Christina, Andrew (tho that wouldn’t have changed), Kristin, Edie
- Drunken Karaoke at Sakura Matsuri! (真夏の果実 anybody?) Oh and Obon!
- Opportunity to strengthen certain friendships with ppl I want to get to know better
- Paintball/airsofting with John, my bro, etc.
- The ability to help John and (maybe) Sean find an apartment this summer for the fall

Cons:
- Two words: NO JAPAN
- I needed to do some stuff for my Grandpa (see a few posts back)
- My cousins’ dad (Grandpa’s brother) passed away the other day, and it’d be nice to have someone from here to go
- No freshest sushi I’ve ever had
- No opportunity to try some of the photo ideas I’ve been hoarding and preparing for Japan
- I’ve got very little (if any) American money (cuz it was all in Yen)
- Since I’ve been planning since January, I have no internships
- By the time we found out, all the high school kids (and other College folks) took up all the jobs back home
- I had some… things… I wanted to take care of but decided it wasn’t worth the stress of doing so a few weeks before leaving to another country for the entire summer only to come home and try to figure shite out…
- I don’t get the chance to practice my Japanese with native speakers
- Don’t get to do Crystal’s While-You’re-In-Japan Bingo Board
- Don’t get to buy and bring home all kinds of fun and crazy things

Ahh well, I’m out of ideas for now… If I think of anything new, you know I’ll be adding them!

-B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day
がっかり (Gakkari)
“Disappointed”

Summer = FUBAR

Thanks to this decade’s single most overblown disease “pandemic,” Swine Flu, myself and everybody else involved with the Yamagata Volunteer Teaching program are now up a river without a paddle.

Let me explain.

For five months all four of us have been planning, purchasing supplies, and getting our hopes up for a two month volunteer program that would bring us to Japan. So for those five months, I personally turned down numerous offers for good, paying jobs (ie. wedding photography, etc) as well as internships and other phenomenal opportunities in order to either save money for Japan, or simply because I wasn’t going to be here.

Instead, I’m going to find myself likely working at WalMart again since all the aforementioned weddings will have had a photographer booked by now making half as much in one summer as I would off of just, say 2 or 3 weddings.

Internships are out of the questions, as most of the internship (especially the paid ones) are filled around January or February, at which time I was already committed to Yamagata.

I woulda had money in Japan. My grandparents were loaning me the equivalent of close to two or three thousand dollars to go to Japan. Only catch is that it’s in Yen. Meaning right now all I have is the $30 bucks or so in my bank account and whatever cash I managed to stash for the trip.

So essentially, thanks to a bunch of sick pigs and the ignorant, overreacting masses all over the world myself and my friends find ourselves stuck here in Colorado, without backup plans and without any sense of direction of where to go from here.

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day
怒り (Ikari)
“Anger, hatred, wrath”

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Midsummer Night’s Dream

Nothing fancy today, just some old shots of some of the coolest people I know, students in the Japanese language program here at CSU, performing Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Japanese language and styles.

Mostly this is just a test to make sure Soundslides-built slideshows display right on my blog. Okay so WordPress won’t let me embed any Soundslide slideshows right into my blog (screw you Thanks WordPress). So you’ll have to click and follow the links to view the slideshows (inconvenient, I know).

That and I’m finally done with finals, so I have a bit of time to play around… for now… I’ll be updating again very soon as I get more information and, hopefully, again once I’m in Tokyo.

Until then, よろしくね！

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day
期末試験 (kimatsu shiken)
“Final Exam”

Yamagata Bound

The word is officially in, and all of us who applied to volunteer at Yamagata have been accepted, so now all of the insanity uncertainty related to that have been erased with as few toes stepped on as possible.

It’s tough to believe that in less than a month, I’ll have moved out of my apartment, my brother will have graduated high school, and I’ll be in Tokyo (of course it’s midnight over there, so I’ll likely be out having fun ^^…. or taking pictures of nightlife).

People told me that my 21st birthday would seem to crawl toward me and feel like it would never come… but it was the exact opposite, and sneaked up on me without warning. I feel exactly the same way about Japan and, in fact, the entire semester. In just a year I’ll be preparing for graduation and, hopefully, the JET program.

I’m grateful Andrew, a buddy of mine from Japanese class and former co-worker back in high school, will be going along. He’s the guy who talked me into going to Yamagata in the first place (as opposed to my original plan of going on my own) and has been there before, taking a lot of the uncertainty and anxiety out of the whole process for me. 本当にいい友達だよ。

There’s still a fair amount of uncertainty though going in, as far as what I plan on doing cell phone-wise, the availability of internet in remote little Shinjo. Not to mention after last summer when my Canon 1D’s shutter busted shooting my cousin’s wedding after only having it a year, I’m worried about the possibility of it failing on me again, even after having the shutter replaced already. And I may have to send my wide angle 17-40mm lens back in to Canon for repairs on the same damage they just repaired for me a couple months ago… It’s having trouble autofocusing and it’s driving me insane.

All this and more to come! Stay tuned ^^

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day
無常 (Mujou)
“Uncertainty”

A New Beginning

I’m converting this blog into a documentation of my personal journey to rediscover my family’s history — MY HISTORY — and make it relevant for me here and now.

My journey began with the Manzanar “Beyond the Barbed Wire” story, but it’s far from over. This summer, I am (at least as far as I know right now) slated to go to Yamagata, Japan for a volunteer English teaching program. Of course ultimately I want to finally visit Japan for the first time (not counting when I was a year old), but my ulterior motive is to see what life is like in the country where so many of my relatives used to live, and a few still do.

I was originally planning on waiting to start my blog until the week or so leading up to my flight out of Denver en route to Japan. However after my experience this weekend, specifically this afternoon, I feel the time to begin is now.

Lately there has been some doubt as to whether or not I will even be going to Yamagata as originally planned. I have hotel reservations, flight information, and the works already laid out, so getting there won’t be a problem. But after today, I’ve decided that even if I am not to go to Yamagata, I will for 100% sure be going to Japan.

I went to my grandparents house today in Aurora, to show my grandma some nifty little pouches my mom makes and is selling (if you’re interesting, buy from me!) and ended up talking with my grandpa about Japan and my trip.

Last night they gave me Japanese Yen for my birthday, as an incentive to not spend any of it before my trip. While in their backyard, they pulled out an entire pocketbook filled with Yen, enough to essentially get me through my entire trip.

My grandpa sits on a bench next to his Koi pond in the backyard of his house, over a year ago (3/3/08)

My grandpa had one request for me, though. Because he recently had surgery, he now is hooked up to an oxygen machine and it pains him to do the simplest tasks gardening in his backyard. He struggled to plant seeds in his garden and refill the water bucket beside the soil while I watched.

His request was that, if I were to spend any time in Tokyo (which I will be) that I contact his sister-in-law, Yukie, and ask her to take me to his brother’s grave to place flowers at. His request was, essentially, a way of admitting that he didn’t think he was ever going to be able to go to Japan again. It felt like a last wish.

He also asked that if I visit Hiroshima that I lay flowers at the graves of his generation of family, his father and mother, etc.

He said how proud he was his grandson was finally going to Japan.

And I cried for nearly an hour during my drive back to Fort Collins.

Yamagata or no Yamagata, volunteer program or no volunteer program, I am now determined hellbent on making it to Japan this summer. Time is so precious a commodity, I feel terrible and scared that I may be far away in Japan when/if my grandpa’s time comes (knock on wood). But yet I know that I have to do this for him, I have to fulfill his wish because I will never be able to forgive myself if I allow this matter to go unsettled.

これはおじいちゃんのために。これはすべての家族のために。

Japan here I come.

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word of the Day
家族 (Kazoku)
“Family”

Come See the Paradise

I finally brought the story and showed my parents and family. After seeing the photos, reading the story and watching the video, it had an effect I’ve never seen before.

My family began talking about internment, what they knew, who they knew. It was quite the experience.

My dad, who did not have family interned as his entire family was in Hawaii and under the standard restrictions there, went right upstairs and came back with an old VHS tape. It was called “Come See the Paradise.”

A movie I had heard about but never seen for myself, it really hit at the heart of what internment did to people. Far superior in storytelling than the “Farewell to Manzanar” movie adaptation, it did however lack a little bit in detail.

What surprised me most is that my grandma apparently had said this is the most accurate depiction of what inside the camps was like.

For those of you who might possibly be interested in learning more about internment, I highly suggest checking out “Come See the Paradise” (starring Tamlyn Tomita of Karate Kid 2, and Dennis Quaid). The first half or so leading up to internment is kinda slow, but helps set the scene.

Again, thanks all for following me! The story may have printed, but the message and project are alive and breathing, just waiting for the opportunity to become something bigger.

- B.I. 岩本龍夫

Japanese Word (in this case, Phrase) of the Day
一生懸命 (Issho Kenmei)
“With all one’s might”