Urban Decay

In Japan, many communities have what is called a 'Shotengai' or a 'Shop Street', it is an area where many small shops are concentrated along, an often covered, street. Some, in larger areas do quite well, especially if there is nearby convenient public transportation such as a major train station. However, without such fortune many become shuttered, decaying places.

Nightfall

These are some shots of Osaka that I took at nightfall.

From the apartment's balcony.

The rest of the series were shot at Osaka Station. Specifically, a pedestrian bridge over the intersection, between JR Osaka, Hankyuu Umeda, and Hanshin Umeda stations, and over top of the Umeda subway station. You can also walk to each one of those stations and many more without ever coming up to the surface world. However, above ground is only place you can see skies like this:

The cars moved a bit, I think I will have fun perfecting this technique. Long exposure, and small aperture. In this case, not quite small enough.

How do they build those tall buildings? Cranes.

And lots of them.

Reaching for the sky:

Lightning

As summer is well and truly over: my favourite picture from this summer.

I took this shot just before the 2008 Yodogawa Fireworks Festival got underway. It was a 3 second exposure, and was quite overexposed. However, thanks to photoshop I was able to bring the colours back. Shot in .jpg I can't help but wonder how the additional detail in a .raw file would have helped.

I didn't manage to get any shots of the fireworks as this storm rolled over and proceeded to rain for all but 5 minutes of the fireworks show, which nevertheless was quite beautiful.