Home Sweet Home Hokkaido 1998 – 2002

I lived in rural Hokkaido from 1998 – 2002, my first four years in Japan. I loved the fields and mountains, the champagne powder snow and rich, saturated island light.

It was on Hokkaido that my passion for photography really developed, so to speak. Unfortunately, I had little money for such an expensive pastime – a roll of film was a luxury – and digital cameras were still bleeding-edge tech.

I did, however, take a few keepers, which were later scanned and I have now uploaded to the series Home Sweet Home Hokkaido 1998 – 2002: Photos.

Take a look at Medium.com https://medium.com/series/9cb2804d546a

 

 

Japan Photo Drift: Hokkaido (Gallery 3 of 3)

Pictures of Countryside around Biei and Furano, Hokkaido Japan, Summer 2012

… and here it is, the last of three galleries of photos from a trip R. and I took to Hokkaido, including my old JET Programme host town of Biei, in the summer of 2012.

BTW, I’m at work on a personal essay about my time in Hokkaido when I first moved to Japan 16+ (!) years ago for the Transitions Abroad narrative travel writing contest. Look for the story, working title Extreme Japan: slow travel epiphanies from the far ends of Japan, in the TA winners’ circle. Or in the highly unlikely event that I don’t win, here on the pages of Big Sushi, Little Fishes…

Photography Notes: As mentioned previously, I usually set my cameras to shoot RAW + JEPG. It’s easy to messy up settings in the menu of an Olympus PEN camera, however, especially early models, and at some point early on I ended up getting only JPEGS shot through the Grainy Film Art Filter on these shoots (the colour shots were taken with a Canon G9). All the B&W shots in this gallery were taken with the m/Zuiko 45mm 1.8 prime lens.

Japan Photo Drift: Hokkaido (Gallery Two)

Pictures of Summer in Biei, Hokkaido

Although I developed, so to speak, a passion for photography during the four years I lived on Japan’s rural, northernmost island of Hokkaido — island light! — I don’t have digital copies of those first pictures.

These pictures are from a summer trip R. and I took to the Biei area of central Hokkaido in 2012. Although I didn’t really appreciate it then — I was alone, my girlfriend being in Tokyo — the Biei area is very photogenic. Cigarette commercials and TV dramas like to use the patchwork fields and dramatic treelines as their settings.

By the way, the volcano pictures are from an aborted climb up Asahidake, in Daisetsuzan National Park.

Japan Photo Drift: Hokkaido (First Gallery)

Pictures from Hokkaido, Summer 2012

I lived on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, for four years when I first moved to Japan – from the summer of 1998 to 2002. Although I left Hokkaido for Tokyo twelve years ago and don’t regret the move, Hokkaido for me then was one of those seminal times in life when you are, as they say, “in the right place at the right time.”

Recently I started to write once again about what it was like for an inner-city kid to find himself in a rural part of Japan on an island which, at the time, most people had never heard of. I’ll write more about Extreme Japan: slow travel epiphanies on Hokkaido and Iriomote…

For now, I’m sorting and editing pictures from a trip R. and I took to central Hokkaido — Biei/Furano and Asahidake — in the summer of 2012. Thought I’d start to share some of them on Big Sushi…