Getting Back On My Feet | I Moved To Japan

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 | ISO 200, f4, 1/125

I took a break from this blog but now I’m back. 

This wasn’t by choice, but because I was working my day job while packing up to move to Japan . . . Yep, I’ll be in Japan for a while.

Here are a few photos and an explanation as to how and why it happened.

Moving To Japan

The story goes, my wife and I and daughter needed to move to a two bedroom and my wife is pregnant with another. Since we were going to go through the hassle of moving everything into a new apartment anyway, we decided to pack everything into a storage unit instead and move to Japan where we can have the second baby out here, close to her family.

So for the last few months I’ve been working on the new Destiny 2 trailers in the day / into the nights (I’m a trailer editor for a living), while packing everything up into storage on the weekends. That equaled no time for my second job . . . this site. 

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 | ISO 200, f4, 1/320

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 | ISO 200, f4, 1/160

For the next six or seven months I’ll be working on shooting photography and writing on this blog full-time while here in Japan. I also have some cool articles and possibly videos planned for this site as well.

Also, expect to see a lot of lens reviews. I think the next one I’ll post will be the 7Artisans 35mm f1.2, a little lens I’ve kind of fallen in love with.

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 | ISO 200, f1.2, 1/18000

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 I SO 200, f1.2, 1/4000

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 I ISO 200, f1.2, 1/2700

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 I ISO 200, f1.2, 1/11000

Getting Back On My Feet

I’m still just getting back on my feet, I’ve brought all my lights and modifiers but I couldn’t fit the stands on the plane. So I need new light stands, some matte board and I may try to build a new resolution chart which takes weeks. I also don’t have a light weight backpack, or a form of transportation or even an apartment yet. For transportation I’m trying to get a bike, a Fuji Ballad upgraded with a Shimano Sora groupset with drop bars which I’m pretty excited about if I can actually get it built.

Couple other updates – I killed my newsletter with Mailchimp and switched over to Sendy with the mail server powered by Amazon AWS (I’ll have the sign up form back up soon). Then I switched from Pushcrew over to Onsignal for my push notifications. Mailchimp and Pushcrew were just too expensive especially since I’m living low-budget here in Japan. You can subscribe with the little bell on the bottom right.

Stay tuned.

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 | ISO 200, f4, 1/2900

Samples of the 7Artisans 35mm f1.2.

I shot the B&W photos RAW and converted to JPEG Arcos in camera and did some minor touch-ups in Lightroom. Everything else on this post was shot with the same lens and the Fujifilm X-T2 with the VSCO Kodak Gold look applied.

If you’re looking for a relatively cheap lens to beat up on that’s good for street photography, this is one of 7Artisans better designs. Just keep it away from bright lights like really sunny days since it flares pretty bad, it also has some pretty noticeable distortion. Full review coming soon.

7Artisans 35mm f1.2 – Amazon / BHphoto

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/180

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/125

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/110

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/200

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/850

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/340

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/640

ISO 200, f1.2, 1/80