Two of my favorite 6×6 film scans from Japan. Forests of bamboo and the streets of Shibuya.

Exactly one month ago, just days after the Christmas holiday, I boarded a 14 hour flight from Houston to Tokyo, Japan. I have been extremely fortunate to have seen, traveled and photographed many far off destinations during my life, and year after year Tokyo, and Japan in general, have shown up on my “travel” bucket list. It was this year that I got to finally cross it off.

Many of you may not know and even after a face to face encounter, may not realize it, but I am of partial Japanese decent. One of my grandmothers is 100% Japanese and many members of my family including my mother either speak Japanese, live there currently or have lived there at some point in their life. Not only has Japan been on the “I NEED to go there” list for so long given how amazing it is to visit and photograph, but also due to the fact that it is my motherland.

I know several photographers that travel extremely light; one body, one lens, and nothing else. Other photographers take everything but the kitchen sink. I’m somewhere in the middle. I like to pack rather light, but I do enjoy a variety of cameras and like to be prepared. ALWAYS BE PREPARED! For this trip I was armed with a Hasselblad 501c/m medium format film camera, my usual 5D mark II travel outfit and my trusty iPhone 4s. Most of my images were personal pictures and casual snapshots. There were no premeditated themes or stories, just a random sampling of images from the nearly three-week adventure.

Street snapshots near Machida, Tokyo.

Since each camera has its advantages and disadvantages I do find myself juggling cameras on occasion, but for the most part I am pretty skilled at keeping a low profile, being discreet and swapping out cameras and lenses in busy places without being noticed. I’m more accustomed to travel destinations where it’s a necessity to keep expensive gear concealed, and while blending in and not being noticed is really second nature, it was rather unnecessary as everywhere I traveled around Japan I felt 100% safe, not to mention the fact that nearly everyone in Japan, tourists and locals alike, wore expensive DSLR’s around their shoulders like purses or backpacks. In some instances not having a large camera on your person would have made you stand out more than having one.

Everywhere I explored, from the crazy streets of Ginza, Shibuya, and Harijuku to the quiet and peaceful temples in Nara and Kyoto, I was completely amazed and blown away by everything around me. The history, the culture, the food and the landscapes were awe-inspiring. I tried my best to take it all in, and do it justice with my quick frames. It would take me months or years to truly take in everything the small island nation has to offer, however after my three week excursion I really felt like I had taken a lot in. My advice to anyone with the notion of traveling to Japan is to go for at least 2 weeks. There is so much to see and experience that a week or less would be an injustice.

In lieu of a long-winded, day-by-day travel account of my journey, here is a bulleted, non-chronological list of some of the things I did while I was there:

• Walked through the largest wooden building in the world, the Todai-ji temple in Nara. Dates back to the 700′s
• Fed the famous “bowing” Sika deer of Nara…with my mouth. They are regarded as messengers of the gods and roam freely
• Watched my hometown Houston Texans win their first ever playoff game, live, from Japan, at 6am
• Tried and failed to work numerous toilets and other bathroom related contraptions
• Watched This Is Spinal Tap (and about 30 other movies) on an airplane
• Got lost in the world’s busiest (and most confusing) train station, Shinjuku Station, Tokyo. 3.64 million people per day travel through the station. It is a madhouse
• Successfully navigated my way across the crazy intersections of Shibuya.
• Saw more plates of wax food than I can count
• Visited some distant relatives and experienced a complete language barrier
• Drove the winding roads in the snow-peaked mountains near the Mitake Valley and Ome, Japan, near the Tachikawa airfield where my grandfather was stationed during the war. (Also the site of my favorite photo ever)
• Had some of THE BEST bowls of Ramen at a roadside, hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the mountains
• Experienced the amazingness of Ghana Chocolate ice cream at a Japanese truck stop
• Saw the sun rise over Mount Fuji in a Shinkansen bullet train going almost 200mph
• Zig-zagged through a seemingly never-ending forest of bamboo
• Saw a palace made of gold. (the Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto)
• Slept in a traditional Japanese tatami room, complete with paper walls
• Felt extremely awkward while coughing when 90% of everyone wore masks
• Mastered the subway and railway systems
• Visited what HAD to be the largest camera store in the world (the Yodobashi electronics complex in Shinjuku)
• Experienced the splendor of heated floors and heated toilet seats
• Watched some of THE nuttiest Japanese television programs and saw a music video, shot in Houston, that I was present for, air on Japanese TV
• Had some of the best Japanese cuisine ever (home-cooked, in restaurants, and a couple of amazing street food fairs)
• Went to Garlic Jo’s and Shakey’s Pizza (I’m officially jealous of you, West Coast)
• Went to McDonald’s on yet another continent
• Experienced an earthquake

Feeding the famous Sika deer of Nara, Japan. Photo courtesy of Alex Vickery.

I’lll be making one additional post in the coming weeks highlighting a little photo essay I did using my iPhone 4s, but for now, I have included not one, but three Photoshelter slide shows below. The first contains 90 of my favorite images taken with my digital outfit. The second features about 50 or so of my favorite 6×6 film images from the trip and the last highlights a ton of my unedited, quickie, iPhone 4s snapshots from the journey.

Which is your favorite batch? Check them out and let me know what you think!

Digital favorites from Japan:

JAPAN 8×12 (JANUARY 2012) – Images by Todd Spoth

6×6 film favorites from Japan:

JAPAN 6×6 (JANUARY 2012) – Images by Todd Spoth

iPhone 4s favorites from Japan:

JAPAN IPHONE (JANUARY 2012) – Images by Todd Spoth

Quick portrait of Heather at a rest stop somewhere in New Mexico.

The first two weeks of August were a couple of the most hectic work weeks of the year for me. I had several commercial jobs that required a lot of intense office time, editing, and outputting images as well as several other editorial jobs inter-weaved. I’m always grateful of having work, but as the second week in August came to a close I was feeling like I needed a little break from the office and from life in general.

Heather had been stressed with work and school herself, so over a casual Tex-Mex dinner we looked at each other and decided to just drive. We needed to get out of town, be spontaneous, and just go. We both agreed to drive somewhere each of us had never been to before, so my first thought was The Grand Canyon. I have driven pretty much everywhere in the US, but have never managed to visit Northern Arizona or The Grand Canyon. Neither had she, so we left…straight from there…no plan, just the open road.

Even though both of our smart phones had GPS’, I knew that eventually we would be somewhere with sketchy cell reception, so our first purchase was a copy of the 2012 Rand McNally atlas.

This is the circuitous route, encompassing about 2800 miles, we ended up taking, highlighted in our atlas. Ignore the route up to Oklahoma, that was a mistake!

We had a car, I had a bag of cameras, and we each had a bag of clothes. It was Sunday evening, about 5pm, the sun was looking to set. We were full of Tex-Mex and trying to push the food coma away. Neither of us had gotten much sleep the night before, and my morning was spent on a hectic shoot with Deion Sanders and Mike Tirico of NFL/ESPN fame. We were both more prepared for a lengthy nap, than a 10 hour drive.

Our first stop was Amarillo, Texas up in the Texas panhandle. We drove well into the night, through Fort Worth and spent a few hours catching up on sleep in Amarillo. The next stop was Flagstaff, Arizona which we pulled into the next evening. Flagstaff was one of our favorite little cities and definitely a place I would move in a heartbeat. We had a great meal at a small brewery where I got to watch The Texans win their second pre-season game. After exploring a bit, we got some sleep.

We woke up as the sun was breaking, and made the 1.5 hour drive up to Grand Canyon National Park. It was in the mid 50′s and we were not prepared for the cold, but the drive was beautiful, the light was amazing. We didn’t seem to care that we were in clothing more suited for our daily 100-degree-plus weather. I forgot what its like to see the sunrise. I need to do this more often.

Everything I had read on The Grand Canyon lead me to believe it was a huge tourist trap with wall-to-wall people from all over the world and we would be visiting in the peak time of the year, Summer. I was prepared for the worst, but surprised to find that it was all but deserted. We had the entire park to ourselves.

We drove from outlook to outlook, taking in the incredible views along the way. We climbed out on remote rocks, scared ourselves and had a great time.

I brought my entourage of cameras with me including my Polaroid Spectra, a digital body with a few lenses and a few other toy cameras that Heather had fun with. After getting home and editing the images from the trip. I was re-inspired by the square format. I also realized that I really need a Hasselblad.

After we exited the park, we headed south towards Sedona. We explored the red rock area, dipped into a freezing creek of crystal clear water and then headed further south to Phoenix. We decided to take the southern route via Interstate 10 home, instead of backtracking the way we came. We wanted to see different landscapes and that we did, as the forest and red rock of Northern Arizona quickly gave way to cacti and other drier landmarks through Phoenix and Tuscon. It seemed like we saw pretty much every geophysical area on the trip; mountains, canyons, plains, boulders, deserts, forest. You name it, we saw it. Even when we were exhausted from 9 hour shifts behind the wheel, having interesting scenery to wonder at, made everything ok.

Even, in the dark of night we had fun.

A road-side long exposure somewhere in New Mexico.

After the sun had set on our adventurous day that began with a sunrise over The Grand Canyon, we decided to push forward through El Paso, into the desolate West Texas town of Van Horn where we spent a few hours getting some sleep.

In the morning we detoured down highway 90 towards Valentine and Marfa, Texas. We visited the famed Prada Marfa installation, and explored Marfa and a few other small Texas towns along the route back up to the interstate. I tried to channel my inner Allison V Smith along the way. I mounted one of my GoPro HD cameras from the rear view mirror and had the camera capture 1 still frame every second until I had about 10,000 images. I compiled them into a time-lapse video seen below. I added the appropriately-named instrumental track, “To West Texas”, by Austin-natives, Explosions in the Sky from the Friday Night Lights soundtrack to add some drama to the piece. I kept it simple, with no editing to the piece itself. It’s entirely straight from the camera. Throughout the journey I mounted the GoPro to various parts of the car and captured lots of different video clips that I’m sure I will eventually add here, but for now, check out the time-lapse of us driving through West Texas.

GoPro HD in-car Time Lapse traveling through West Texas from Todd Spoth on Vimeo.

After getting back onto I-10, we made good time getting back home. We had driven almost 2800 miles in only 4 days. No accidents, no tickets, nothing stolen and nothing lost. We had seen more in 4 days that many have seen in years and had an absolutely unforgettable time. I am someone who loves to be in control, loves to plan, loves to make sure I have everything in place well before a trip to ensure nothing goes wrong, but sometimes not planning and just going with the flow and sheer spontaneity of the moment is really whats right and I learned that in those 4 days.

Sometimes we all just need to get away.

THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST (AUGUST 2011) – Images by Todd Spoth

Four images by Todd Spoth as they appeared in the 2010 show, "Convergences"

Back in June I was invited to participate in a group gallery show put on by my good friend, Alfonso Cantarero. The show, entitled, “Convergences” featured a lot of amazing work by several local artists from different backgrounds and disciplines. Once I saw that most of the participants were amazing illustrators, painters and street artists, I was humbled to be chosen as one of the few photographers to show. The show held a great opening night at War’Hous Studios Gallery on June 26th and featured some awesome music and good food.

In preparing for the show I struggled a bit with what I wanted to show. My anxiety only increased when I saw that most of the other artists were street artists. After a bit of thinking I came up with an idea. I had been sitting on some nice medium format scans from a few months ago (see this older blog post about the medium format images here) and thought that this was a great opportunity to showcase those. Since those images were square I decided to create a 2×2 grid of square prints. Ideally, I would have loved to have added additional images to make the grid larger, to possibly a 3×3 or even 4×4, but given the time and space constraints I went with 4 simple images.

I consciously chose images that were fairly recent (all but 1 was captured in the last couple of months) as well as images from my archive that were fairly unseen (besides being posted on the blog that is). If it isn’t obvious already, I love vibrant colors, so I wanted the prints to be displayed in color versus black and white.

As for the theme of the images, it came to me while struggling between wanting to showcase my portrait work and showcasing more of my abstract work that is not usually seen by many. I ultimately decided on a compromise and found 4 images that were centered around 1 person, but were still semi-abstract. Since the eyes are one of the most important component in a portrait I decided to choose 4 images where the eyes of the subject were obscured or hidden, giving the subjects a level of animosity and imposing a sense of mystery on the viewer.

Given the feedback of a few visitors to the gallery, I believe my theme was a success. Two of the images are digital captures, the other two are film scans. Each are 20″x20″ print was chemically produced onto Kodak E-surface paper and professionally mounted onto 1/4 inch foam core.

Now that the show is over I will be selling each of these prints for just $75. The proceeds from the sale(s) will help fund an exciting upcoming project. The prints can be shipped anywhere and I can accept any form of payment so please contact me if you are at all interested!

More detailed info on each image is below.

This image is from a playful underwater shoot we did back in May at a very upscale condominium complex here in downtown Houston, Texas. The high-rise had a roof-top lounge pool that offered nice vistas to shoot against. We had access to a very nice (and expensive) underwater housing for our digital camera rig during the shoot and took advantage of that resource. The rig itself was VERY challenging to say the least, but it was a blast getting to try something new. I have underwater housing for my smaller digital rigs, but this was a whole new animal. This particular image was something I had captured in between sessions. Most of the portraits were shot with the models half in and out of the water and this image, shot as the model playfully jumped into the pool after her session was wrapped, was one of my favorite outtakes from the day.

This image, which is one of the two medium format film scans, is actually of my brother, Zach. We had just acquired the Lubitel twin lens camera and had taken it to a family gathering. I took my brother outside and had him pose in front of some foliage in the backyard. Being of that age, he feigned interest and I captured this image of him wiping his face between takes. I’ve loved this image and moment from the first time I scanned it in.

This image is the other medium format film scan of the 4. It was actually taken on the same roll as the above photo, only minutes after that image was captured. It was my first double exposure with the Lubitel twin lens camera. I really liked the brush that was growing in my father’s backyard so I captured an image of that and double exposed a portrait on top. I believe she was touching her face for some reason. This was another in-between moment that I loved. You can barely make out her right eye. We haven’t put many rolls through the Lubitel, but to this day, this frame is still my favorite.

This final image was the only image captured more than a few months ago. It was taken on July 19th, 2009 in the Limpopo province of South Africa. I believe we were in a van headed towards a game ranch in Alldays when I captured this. There was beautiful scenery all around us and I was stuck in the dead middle of a van stuffed with people and gear. I was annoyed at the fact that I did not have a window seat to capture drive by images so after a little thought, I made it work in my favor.

Today’s blog is the 3rd in our 4-part travel series and focuses on images from our Lubitel 166, twin-lens, medium format camera.

We put a few rolls through the Lubitel during our trip, but it is fairly new to our collection. It was acquired back in March and it takes a bit of getting used to, but I have definitely made some frames I really dig. A few months ago I made a blog post highlighting a few of the first rolls through it. (<—– click over there to check out the first Lubitel blog!)

The Lubitel 166+ (the version we own) is a twin-lens medium format camera that is a reissue of the older Lubitel models, which were actually based on the old Voigtlander Brillant camera. Unlike its predecessors, our version is plastic and very lightweight, which is both a benefit and a hindrance depending on how you look at it. On one hand I love that I can hang it around my neck and almost forget it’s there, but at the same time, I get nervous when I have to stuff it in the bottom of a full camera bag for fear it might be crushed, or crack somehow. Luckily I haven’t had any issues. The controls are fairly simple, but anyone who has ever tried to carefully compose a shot with a TLR and a waist level viewfinder (without a tripod) will understand the frustration. As someone who came from a graphic design background and puts a lot of stock in careful composition and lines, I sometimes find myself frustrated when trying to fine tune a shot, but after the film is developed and I realize I nailed it, (if I actually did nail it) I feel like I just conquered the world.

Given the time and effort that goes into every frame, we only managed to run 3 rolls of 120 Kodak Portra 400vc through it during the trip. Shooting the 6×6 format (which I prefer to the rectangular) we only get 12 exposures per roll, meaning that we walked away with 36 total frames about half of which I liked and are in a slideshow at the bottom of the post. That is an almost 50% keeper rate, which in the world of photography, isn’t bad at all. The vivid color film makes the colors pop nicely as you can see in the above image of the cornfield against the blue sky. The images have a definite mood and texture to them which I like. If you’re wanting a quick snapshot of a scene and have only a few seconds, there are other cameras that will do a better job, but if you can spare a few minutes and can take your time in a fairly static scene, the Lubitel can give you a nice image. Of course, it’s no Hasselblad, but for the price and weight, it can’t be beat.

15 of our favorite Lubitel images from our trip are below, including a few more double exposures as well. Let me know what you think of them on the Todd Spoth Photography Facebook page or Twitter page and stay tuned for the last post in the series (which may be the most interesting) coming soon!

JULY 2010: LUBITEL OHIO – Images by Todd Spoth

The abandoned building which once was a bustling Hoover Appliance factory. North Canton, Ohio.

I just wanted to start this post off by thanking everyone that took the time to check out the previous blog post about the huge Blurb book we created for my grandmother. A record number of viewers checked out the blog and I am still getting positive comments from all over the globe.

I talked a little about the trip to visit family in the previous blog, however this blog will be the first in a series of four, dedicated to the images made during that trip. Even though it was a mostly personal trip, I still managed to capture plenty of images along the way. The fact that the trip was a no pressure, non-business, situation allowed me to take out some old toys and have a little fun.

Each of the four blogs will concentrate on images captured with a certain camera or device, digital, film, cellphone or otherwise. You’ll have to stay tuned to check out the upcoming blogs, but today’s blog focuses on the Lomo Oktomat, a tiny plastic camera that captures 8 different frames onto one single frame of film. The tiny plastic lens all aimed in slightly different directions make this toy camera one of the funnest cameras in my collection. And you can’t argue with the price either!

I must have picked up this little 35mm toy camera from Lomo for about $35 or so, at least 4 or 5 years ago (before Lomo and Urban Outfitters got in bed together) and have used it fairly sporadically ever since. I guess that is the nature of the toy camera or at least for the cameras in my collection. I have a ton of toy cameras and old Polaroid cameras that get taken out randomly. There are a few that I really love and travel with me often, but most are just for fun. There are a few Polaroid cameras in my collection I would love to take everywhere, but given the scarcity and thus, the price, of certain Polaroid films that is impossible, but that’s a story for another day.

For the Oktomat, there are few concerns. It is 35mm, which makes it easy to find and process the film, the size is tiny in comparison to some of my other toy behemoths, and the controls are pretty much non-existent, in a good way. There is no (real) viewfinder for you to fine tune compositions, no manual exposure dials and no options for a flash. You simply point (in the general direction of) and shoot. With a quick crank of the film advance lever you are ready to go. Since its 35mm you will change film less as it can have 36 exposures rather than 12 or 16. It takes the saying, “shooting from the hip” to a whole new level.

The frames are grainy and dirty (mostly due to my shoddy scanning abilities), some frames come out dark and unusable, some blurry and sometimes the plastic film advance dial doesn’t want to properly advance the film, but it’s all of the above that add to the overall appeal of the camera, especially when you can pull a nice, dreamy, diamond from the rough.

Libby's ink and watercolor representation of the Lomo Oktomat drawn on our trip.

We ended up carrying the Oktomat (illustrated above) wherever we went on our trip from roller coasters at Cedar Point to the middle of the Amish country. In total I believe we shot about 5 or 6 rolls through the camera which I had processed upon our return. They were then scanned in and rediscovered. Since the camera is so unpredictable by nature, it’s pretty interesting to see what came out when you are scanning the images in.

I did some basic edits to my 36 favorite frames and put them into a slideshow which is below.

Tomorrow will feature photos from a different camera so stay tuned!

JULY 2010: OCTOMAT OHIO – Images by Todd Spoth

For Libby’s birthday I got her a vintage Lubitel twin lens camera. She has always loved twin lens units so since the ones in our current collection had completed the transition from functioning camera to sitting on the shelf with the rest of the old-timers, I decided to get a new one. I went with the Lubitel, because it is lightweight (a definite plus for her) simple and is a nice marriage between accuracy and that nice vintage look.

She ran a roll through it while on a business trip a few weeks ago and the results were nice. This week, however, was my turn to test the new toy out. My “toy” for the past few months has been my vintage Polaroid Colorpack III camera so while I was used to the slow process, I was not used to the lack of instant gratification that I get with not only the Polaroid, but with my digital bodies as well.

It took some time to re-calibrate my sense of sight with a waist-level viewfinder once again, but the resulting images were decent. My design background influences my photography and the way I see the world, so my natural OCD with lines and things were put to the test with a very disorienting and someone dim viewfinder. There were scenes that I had wished I would have shot over the week or so that the roll was in the camera, but it gets rather cumbersome when I am juggling a digital camera, a Polaroid camera, an iphone with its own fairly decent camera, and now this Lubitel. The new toys are both fairly large and cumbersome in their own right as well as being plastic and not as robust as my digital bodies so there are definitely challenges.

After my assignment covering a triathlon (blog forthcoming) I swung by the lab and processed my initial test roll which took exactly 1 week to use. I used a 12 exposure roll of Kodak VC (vivid color) 400 ASA for the maiden voyage and was pleased overall. We scanned the frames in using our Canon CanoScan 8800F flatbed scanner with the included negative carrier. I ended up with about 5 images that I liked which I guess isn’t bad for a roll of 12 and for my first time using the camera. I do wish that I was able to somehow scan the images in with the borders intact so that I can see the film info and frame numbers, but I was unable to figure out a way. Libby even constructed a custom carrier, but the scanner’s native software kept throwing us error messages. If anyone has any idea on how I can accomplish this, please let me know.

The 5 selects from the 12 shot roll aren’t the greatest images ever, but I really enjoyed the simple square format and that good-ole film look. They all came out pretty sharp for a plastic camera. There are a couple snapshots from the triathlon this past Sunday, a couple from the previous Sunday visiting family and a random shot from a commercial assignment earlier this past week. The above image is one of the two double exposures that I attempted during the roll. I exposed an image of an interesting area of foliage with an overlay of an image of Libby rubbing her face.

Hopefully Libby will let me “borrow” the camera for some more random fun or possibly a project in the future.

LUBITEL 120 SCANS (APRIL 2010) – Images by Todd Spoth

I’ve been working on the set of the docu-drama The Messenger: 360 Days of Bolivar for months now. I am the associate producer and chief photographer, but since the crew is fairly small, we all take on many different tasks. We are currently in the process of putting together a few trailers for the project, which means filming and subsequently for me shooting stills, has ceased for the time being. Since my stills are being infused in the trailer and eventually movie, I have been editing them a lot over the past few weeks. The image above is one of my favorites thus far. Its moody and abstract. Its of Michael, one of the main subjects’ fishing vessels in Galveston Bay.

I’ve had an extra exciting week. Thursday I did an assignment for the Chron at Moody Garden’s on the relatives of the Titanic survivors. Friday I flew in a helicopter over Galveston and Bolivar for our upcoming movie, The Messenger. Friday, I photographed the amazing guys in Bayside. Saturday was a full day of UH spring football, Astros baseball (and Pence bobble head) and a get together at Kevin’s. Sunday was an epic Saves the Day show. Some great times with great friends. All the while I’m pushing myself to see differently. I think it may just be working.

Above image: Karen Little, 7, stares at a scale model of the Titanic through a glass case, Thursday, April 10, 2008 during an event held at Galveston’s Moody Gardens Titanic exhibit. Karen’s great grandmother, Karen Marie Abelseth was a survivor of the Titanic disaster. April 10th also marks the 96th anniversary of Titanic’s maiden voyage.