Japan Travel Photography on 35mm film

Earlier this year, I got to go to Japan. It was a trip a few years in the making yet it completely exceeded the expectations and hype built up in all that time. We tried to time the trip to cherry blossom season and it worked out perfectly. Matt taught me some conversational Japanese, everyone was incredibly friendly, and we managed to find a lot of great vegetarian food. It was pretty much just the most amazing trip ever.

Some of the highlights in the photos below are the Shenso-ji Temple and Hanayashiki amusement park near where we stayed in Asakusa in Tokyo, the Studio Ghibli Musuem, the Fugaku Fuketsu ice caves near Mt. Fuji, a Tanuki shrine, Fushimi Inari and Kiyomizu Dera temples in Kyoto, a giant golden Buddha statue, Kasuga Shrine, and the Deer Park in Nara. One of my favorite parts of the whole trip was the night time cherry blossom festival/street fair at Maruyama Park in Kyoto. Matt also got a badass tattoo, but that deserves a whole post of its own.

More highlights not pictured – Sega Joypolis amusement park, all of the amazing videogame shops in Akihabara, a Vampire restaurant, a maid cafe, a love hotel in Shibuya, bullet trains, Mt. Fuji (too foggy to really see it), sake, sleeping on tatami mats, the International Manga Museum, the cutest little train in the world, and I’m sure I’m forgetting even more. Just take my word for it that it was all as adorable and awesome as you can imagine.

Because I wanted to travel lightly with camera gear but I also wanted to shoot film, I brought my smallest 35mm cameras – my Canon AE-1, which is manual focus, and my Diana Mini Jiyu because I can’t think of a more perfect camera to take cherry blossom photos with. The only digital camera I brought was my iPhone, and you can see all those photos on flickr, including some of the stuff I didn’t get on film. These photos were a mix of Fuji 400H and Kodak Portra 400.