Every frame, a movie.
My camera is the tool, but my imagination makes the scene.
“Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”
― Stanley Kubrick
I’ve thought about this quote a number of times in the last few days, mostly because a pal dropped Stanley’s name in one of my recent social media posts. I wasn’t actually thinking about 2001: A Space Odyssey, I was just cruising around my ‘hood and saw a building which piqued my interest.
I guess the outcome is brought upon by my imagination. Sure, I could have photographed it exactly as it was with “proper” exposure and without the wild tint and grain, etc., but I wanted it to look way more interesting. To me, this photography style is a very important part of my visual lexicon.
I believe many of my readers will be viewing most Substack articles and notes on their phones. That’s cool, but I hope you can take the time to revisit on a larger device, even an iPad or similar.
I often look up, not at the building as a whole, but how I might see through it or from inside it. A year or so ago, I shot some images in Shinjuku of a scene that I see every single day on the good ol’ socials, but I wanted to see it differently.
Here are a few shots from a stroll I had in Meguro not long ago. How would my images look if I went inside and up the stairs? They’d look pretty interesting!
The encounter is happenstance. The images are not. I know what I want.
I also think about mundane images. Boring. Nothing going on. But what I want you to see or think about is what could be happening before, during, or after the shot. Tokyo is filled with images beyond the POV of a go-kart in Shibuya.
I have a lot more to share, but I’ll leave you with these images. The theater in my head is constantly showing me movies, and every once in a while, those movies play out with my camera and then to you. I hope you enjoyed these frames.
Shall we go to the movies?
