Flowers and Figurines

From September, 1994 to September, 2006 I lived at Kamitakada of Nakano, Tokyo.  In those days objects of the pinhole photographs were, mainly, the view of the neighborhood as shown in the previous page and still lives such as flowers of pot plants or figurines.  An Olympus SLR, OM2 (silver film) was used for taking the pinhole photographs except for the last three photographs in this page.  A body cap for the camera with a pinhole of the diameter 0.3 mm was used, which means that the distance from the pinhole to the sensor is about 50 mm (flange back of OM2: 46 mm).

●[1-3] These flowers are a geranium, a Java velvet plant, and a bougainvillea.  The Java velvet plant we often see in Japan is called gynura japonica which was imported from China in the Edo period.  As a bougainvillea is a plant in the subtropics, formerly it was not seen in the main island of Japan.  But now we can see a bougainvillea in a flower shop anytime.

●[4-6] When an academic meeting was held in Kochi I furnished myself with this Tosa-Inu (Tosa-dog, Tosa is the ancient name of Kochi) carved in wood.  I like also animals carved in wood and often buy cats of wood with exotic perfume.  The cats, an owl, and a self-righting dragon doll line up on a National Geographic magazine.

●[7] These are a dharma doll which I added color at some exhibition site, and a self-righting dragon doll.

●[8-10] The lutile quartz is beautiful quartz which contains a lot of needle-shaped mineral substance.  When we peer through a ball of lutile quartz we have a fancy that we wander off into a forest of the needle-shaped mineral substance.

●[11-13] The last three photographs (the exotic cats, a music box of an angel, and a matryomin) are taken by a digital SLR, Olympus E-300.  A matryomin is a musical instrument made in Japan by combining a Russian doll matroska and a Russian musical instrument theremin.