Tokyo 2024 – 35mm Film – allmyfriendsarejpegs®

On my trip to Tokyo last year, I flip-flopped between shooting film and digital. From experience, sticking to a single medium usually provides the ‘best’, or at least the most cohesive results – and it would have been far easier from a practical perspective to only pack just one camera. However, I had also had something of a film rennaissance over the past few months, and I wasn’t about to waste the opportunity to capture bits of my favourite city on 35mm – so I packed my trust Leica M6 and about 60 rolls of different kinds of film. The original plan was to also take the M2, but that would have pushed my hand luggage weight from ‘ridiculous’ into ‘obscene’ territory – and way outside of the airline’s allowance, so it ended up staying at home.

In the previous post I gave something of an orderly, sequential narrative of the trip – complete with digital pictures, given the reliability and suitability of those kinds of cameras for documenting. Here, I am now going to share a collection of the 35mm shots I gathered along the way. They are in no particular order, and will be accompanied by whatever miscellaneous commentary comes into my mind as I look over them.

I hope you like.

I was fortunate enough to be in Japan during a period when there were a bunch of ‘end of summer’ festivals taking place. I spent a good few days just wandering around, stumbling upon these and taking pictures. This included forcing myself to ask folks to pose… most of which obliged nicely.

Over the years I have built up a huge stockpile of film. This has partly been the result of purchasing rolls in bulk for reasons of economy, but also because I have had a fairly bad tendency to save particular films for occasions that I feel deemed worthy. In other words: I don’t want to waste a particularly special or unusual film on just another day out. Unfortunately, that has meant in many cases that I have never shot particular rolls – and they are now at the point where they have started to fail. As a result, I decided that it was about time I got a grip and just use the damn things, so I packed up all of my long-expired Natura 1600, Neopan 1600, CineStill 800, Fuji Press 800, Kodak 500T, and a bunch of other things – determined not to return to Scotland without exposing them.

Occasionally I ended up getting stopped myself by other photographers who asked to take my picture. Naturally, I then had to get them to return the favour.

One of the films that I was especially committed to using up was my entire stock of Natura 1600. This was originally only available in Japan and has long since been discontinued. I had about 10 rolls of the stuff left, which I bought the very first time I visited the country back in 2016. At this stage, all of my high speed colour film has started to lose sensitivity, and so it really didn’t make any sense to cling onto it for much longer. What better place to shoot it than Tokyo? I rated it at about ISO 800-1200, and got a few reasonable shots – though most were grainy beyond repair, or needed far more exposure to be usable.

I travelled through a good few airports in the six-ish weeks I was in Asia, and whilst I have never historically cared much about the potential impact that multiple x-rays could have on film – I decided that this time around I would push back a bit – requesting hand checks at security. Interestingly enough, the only place that point blank refused was Glasgow – saying that they would only do a manual check if the film speed was over ISO 2500. Definitely a figure that they just plucked out of their arse. When even London Heathrow are more accommodating, you know that you probably need to improve upon your customer service.

Bizarrely enough, one of my rolls of CineStill 800T came out with what looked like liquid damage, combined with some kind of light exposure. I have no idea how that happened, and it doesn’t look like it could be from being exposed to an x-ray machine, but whatever the origin, the results were pretty cool, so I am not too mad about it.

I took a few pictures on film during my shoot with Nami, though I should have taken a lot more – as the ones I did get came out really nicely.

I was especially looking forward to shooting a good chunk of Neopan 1600 – which is my favourite film of all time. I have a slab of this left that I picked up a few years back, so brought along 10 rolls. All of these had expired between 2002 and 2011, so I again rated it between ISO 800 and 1200, which worked out not bad. I developed and scanned it using Kodak HC-110, and got a few shots which I quite liked, including this portrait…

I should probably note that whilst I am still developing my own black and white, I have given up on processing my own C41 and ECN2 entirely. My local lab Glasgow is just a 15 minute walk away, and their service is so good that it would seem foolish to not use them. I considered getting films processed in Tokyo, but none of them could compare in terms of turnaround, price, and scan resolution. In the end, I dropped off over 50 films at Gulabi when I got back to Scotland, and had the pictures in about three hours time – which is awesome. So, all of the colour shots in this post were developed and scanned by them – with post-processing by moi.

Occasionally when I was out and about taking pictures, people would notice, and strike a pose. Given how friendly everybody was, I should probably have been a bit less self-conscious about shooting in general – though I suspect that this is going to always be a constant feeling with ‘street photography’. I’m just not sure I necessarily have it in me to be as bold as you probably have to be to be really great.

Another film that I took with me was Lomochrome Purple. This is an unusual stock which has a significant colour shift – akin to old infrared films like Aerochrome. I’ve used it before a couple of times for band promo shots, and wanted to see how it looked with Tokyo’s city lights. I actually wish that I had used more of it, because some of the pictures came out especially cool. I don’t want to use the CyberPunk cliche, but ehhhh?!?

I really love the motion blur in the below picture, and I could pretend that it was on purpose… but in reality I had accidentally set the camera to a shutter speed of 1/60 for a bunch of shots before that, and only realised after taking this one. Oops.

You will no doubt have spotted the shots above that are split down the middle. These were shot with either an Olympus Pen W or an Olympus Pen F – two half frame cameras that I picked up whilst in Tokyo. It was probably something of a foolish idea to snap away with two untested bodies in a format that I had never used before, but it also seemed like a good opportunity to try something new. These basically allow you to shoot two pictures on a single standard 35mm frame – opening up creative possibilities. I didn’t necessarily take particularly great advantage of that – but still. I’ll post more about them specifically at some point.

The Olympus W is beautiful – with the brass paint showing through from under the black paint. However, it seems like the film didn’t catch and wind on properly a few times, resulting in some pretty wild overlapping exposures.

Outside of the half-frame cameras, all of the regular 35mm pictures were shot with my Leica M6. There was a period of time where I wasn’t really using it very much, partly because it was too good. That might seem like a devastatingly stupid thing to say, but the M6 is such a classic, reliable camera, that I almost prefer the trials and tribulations of using something a bit weirder. However, for this trip it was perfect. It stood up to a significant amount of abuse in the rain and humidity, and whilst I have had mixed feelings about it in the past, I was grateful that the built-in light meter let me focus purely on taking pictures – instead of worrying too much about exposure. It was a pleasure to shoot with.

I am a big fan of lemon drinks, and the last time I was in Tokyo I discovered a particularly delicious fizzy lemon drink. It tasted especially delicious given that almost all of the juice in the UK has now got artificial sweeteners in it thanks to the Tory’s ‘sugar tax’. The one catch was that this specific drink wasn’t available in the corner shops or even every vending machine, so it became something of a quest to check every one that I passed, and buy a couple of cans any time I came across it.

The picture below shows two different establishments just off the West Gate of Ikebukuro station. I loved the way they looked, though they are also the kind of place that I might be hesitant to go into based on first impressions. They are in an area where there are a lot of… err, ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, and not so many tourists for a start – which can make stumbling in to an unexpected and undesirable situation a real possibility. However, we ended up going to the bar on the left a good few times as it was near where we were staying, open late, and the perfect spot to hang out after the last train. The sours here were some of the best I’ve ever tasted, and the staff were really friendly once they got to know our faces. We even had some fairly intoxicated conversations in a mixture of broken Japanese/English which ended in hilarity. I should probably stop writing about it now because the fact I can’t jump in for a yuzu drink and delicious shibire fried chicken right now is genuinely distressing.

I had three lenses with me for the M6 on this trip: A 15mm f4.5, 35mm f1.4, and 50mm f1.1 – all Voigtlander. The 35mm has always been one of my go-to choices thanks to its quality, physical size, and wide aperture. This trip was no exception, though I did also make liberal use of the 15mm. The field of view is so wide that you need to utilise an external finder, and I discovered after the fact that it doesn’t really provide a particularly accurate representation of what is included in the frame – meaning that I had to crop down some of the results fairly substantially. In future, I will need to remember to compensate by tilting the camera down slightly.

Perhaps due to the time of year, there were a significant number of people dressed up in traditional summer clothing – particularly at tourist attractions like Sensō-ji temple. This is something of an endearing ritual that many visitors choose to participate in, and there were far more foreigners in the city than I ever remember seeing on previous visits. Of course, this made for some great photo opportunities, and I specifically asked the two girls below if I could take their picture because of how brightly coloured their yukata were – doing so in Japanese. Unfortunately, the film I shot with was either so expired or so over-exposed that you don’t quite get the full effect, and as it turns out they weren’t even from Japan so had no idea what I was saying, but they got the gist in the end.

As one might expect, there were a bunch of street photographers roaming around Tokyo. The guy below spotted that I was shooting with a Leica, and we ended up chatting a bit in Japanese until I ran out of vocabulary and he said that he couldn’t speak English. Naturally, we took a portrait of each other.

Craft beer is less prominent and seems to be popular in Japan than it does in the West, but there are definitely some interesting things happening. I went along to a mini beer festival on one of the days, and met this mad guy who was carrying out a bottle of tequila, trying (and failing) to get people to take shots with him. He asked me, and naturally I said yes. Before I knew it he was pouring the stuff down my throat, and we ended up having a pretty interesting conversation about his wild life.

Rather coincidentally, two of my favourite Japanese artists were playing a gig together whilst I was in Tokyo, and I got a photo pass. The lighting conditions were fairly challenging, and I largely shot digital (you can find the results here) – but I also decided to snap a bunch with my M6. In all honesty, I am surprised that any of them came out at all.

In Shimokitazawa there is a famous pastry shop. I had been there before and it was indeed delicious. I had no specific plans to go back on this trip, but we found ourselves a few streets away coincidentally (honestly!!), and thought oh go on then.