Hello, this is Izumi and I hope you can come with me today as I go for an early walk in the streets with my new friend who will help me with looking for that Decisive Moment which is still elusive for me.

Now I must explain something of the way I am capturing these photographs that you can see here in the pages of my Diary. I am hearing people talk and sometimes they are even asking me about the 'montages' that I am making as if I have two or more images that I am putting together in Photoshop.

I am thinking strongly that such a thing would not be in the spirit of the photographs of M Cartier-Bresson or Mr Alfred Steiglitz or Jeff Carter so it is a thing that I would not do.

No, all the images that I capture and that you see happily here are genuine scenes or reflections as I and my PEN saw them on our walks. Because I shoot RAW I can then make them the best to my vision and emotion in Photoshop and sometimes I crop them for a better composition (as I will show you sometimes here so you can think about if I am right or not) but that is just like putting your hand up in front of your face to cover something that is best not to be there.

I also find that I am made more fully hopeful just by the fact that I can now look through the viewfinder to see scenes that may become photographs, as you can see too by looking at the photographs all around here.

Now I must be honest with my friends and make a confession to you that I am hoping the new camera is not a mistake and that somehow having little fights with the other camera was not making me work and think harder for my photographs and so I was making better photographs because of this.

I do not want this to be an easy camera. We have saying in Japan "Success grows on the tree of persistence" so I am being persistent in my seeking interesting photographs and perhaps you can be persistent too when you come here to look at them.

In my country, especially in the olden days of Emperors, craftsmen who were making art in woodcut or screen or calligraphy or even statue carving or jewellery sometimes had a test of themselves by making work harder than it should be for them. Someone told me once it is like the man who makes swords for Samurai warriors who is putting the steel in the hottest fire of his furnace to make the best and strongest and sharpest blades.

And I am thinking of a Japanese saying as I am walking – amie futtre ji katamaru – which words mean that the rain makes the ground go hard but poetically means that hard activities make you a stronger person. When the light is what I like I will go walking in the rain but until then it does not make me very happy when the light is dull and not contrasty. But I am not an impatient girl and I can wait to become stronger in happy light.

So I am ending my Diary page here and I hope you enjoyed it and I thank you for being here and reading me.

Izumi.