Hello. Here is Izumi to be writing and telling you about my street photographs as I go looking for them.

And this time I am talking to myself again and thinking that I have a little family of fast lenses now (20mm f/1.7, 26mm f/1.4 and 35mm f/1.7 - still no fast wide) and I should go for a walk with them all especially now as it is still dark when I go for my walk in the mornings. But I still want to be more in tune with M Cartier-Bresson and his methods of street walking so I will only take one lens with me each day and see what I can make with him. It will be like a discipline for my artistic soul but not as much hardship as living in a cave in the mountains like monks and samurais of olden times that I see in many films in cinemas back in Japan and on television in Australia.

Here you can see that I need fastness of lenses more than fastness of me.

I was talking to you before about a worry that I have if I go back to places that I have been to before, but this time I think it is different because it is in the night (or the night of the early morning) so the light is different. Funny Izumi - it is hardly not there at all but that is making for interesting highlights and shadows that I do not even get when I have that nice contrasty light into the shop windows that I like and that you can see many times in these pages.

Even if they are not Decisive Moments they can be Dramatic Lightings perhaps, do you think?

Above here are interesting photographs showing how they can be different if I use my fingers for focusing on different parts of the same photograph. Which I have to do with the manual 26mm and 35mm lenses and I even enjoy doing it because it makes me more a part of the process of preparing to capture the photograph like the lioness who is thinking of all the different ways she can use to catch her dinner.

This is also a good example of how depth of field is different depending on how close or far away you have set the lens and if you have invoked the hyperfocal distance or not. When I have focused on the hands the face is really soft but when I focus on the face the hands are much sharper because the depth of field is now bigger. I learned all this from my uncle who told me about optics so that I could understand better how to make what I wanted to do and what the camera wanted to do more in harmony with each other.

Sometimes if I do things like this it is to capture two different but both happy photographs and sometimes like here it is two photographs that can be with each other and tell a story for people looking at them.

I am having good early-early walks and capturing some interesting photographs I think so I will do it some more with taking the different lenses to walk with me.

I am missing a fast wide angle of 14mm or even better at 12mm but I am hearing from people and reading that one is coming soon for my PEN so we can only be patient and wait for him to be born for us.

Now I must go but I say goodbye to you before I do and I hope you are liking what I am walking in the early morning to find.

Thank you,

Izumi.