Living in parallel worlds…
This picture can probably summarise my amazing experience living in Japan on its own…
At first it look very classic, and everything you see here looks common : people, aerial subway, tunnel, bicycles…. this picture could come from New York, Paris, Shanghai…. but it is unique because it comes from Tokyo, Shibuya more precisely…
And living in Japan I could really learn how something looking the same can be felt differently. When you land in Japan things look not so unfamiliar and you feel very confident, people are nice, things are functional and clean, the food is amazing, the weather is usually good… what could put more at ease to discover the city and just enjoy !!
And then you start to experiment things, to get closer to people to get to know more about the culture to understand the socialisation principles in Japan and one day you wake up and it appears brutally to you ! Yes you are just starting to live in a parallel world !
Japan is a country that almost built itself on its own with only very few international interactions before the 19th century and living in this environment is an everyday discovery. You suddenly realise how things can work differently ( or not work sometimes :) ) you have to unlearn many of your principles, many of your well rooted beliefs.
Just to give a concrete examples this is what happen when you press the help button on the vending machine :
This is your best friend in a bar :
This is how the IKEA guy is step by step preparing to assemble your sofa ( when you would probably starting to grab the first screw and try to assemble things at the strength of your fingers…) :
And every single day I had this kind of amazing discovery that I could use for a blog :) but the blog photography came a bit later…
So when I took this pictures I thought that it would be an amazing way to capture 2 parallel worlds :
On the bottom part this guy having fun with her friends exercising her photographer skills
And on the upper part this aerial subway certainly full of salarymen finally coming back home after a classical 14 hours working day.
That’s also one of the dimension I love in photography : it’s the only way to match for the eternity the unmatchable, to freeze for ever the fugacity of an instant.
What about you ? do you have sometimes this perception that you are experiencing a parallel dimension in your life ?
Lets talk tech :
As you can see by the shutter speed ( 1/800 s) this one was about freezing the subway and it was partially successful. To not go lower was for me the way to contain the ISO relatively low and still benefit from a quite sharp picture without too much noise. How would you do this one ?