Another busy week in Tokyo. I am working really hard to keep everything in my life balanced. It easy to get really busy or focused on one thing and have something else end up falling over. For the past few weeks I felt like I have been able to maintain a very good balance on my busy work schedule which I typically measure by making sure I balance my calendar for maximum efficiency, maintaining an empty inbox and a fair short list of action items I am actively working. It is a lot harder than it sounds. I also try to make sure I am current on national and international news, industry news and financial news. I cleaned up my Feedly feed last week which really helps with that. I am also making sure I can keep a consistent and aggressive focus on my Japanese study offline. I also want to make sure I can post at least once a week to ShootTokyo. This is a lot to maintain. I find starting the day early and finishing off a few items quickly really helps to set a pace for the rest of the day. For example, on Saturdays I don't need to go to work usually and I have a few hours free in the morning. It is easy to get distracted on social media, watching TV or spending time on other distractions. I find if I get really focused on just these tasks I can complete a bunch of administrative work I need to do at home, review my Kanji and Japanese vocabulary for the day, complete my weekly blog post for ShootTokyo, catchup on photography blogs/news, and write a blog post for TokyoMemo. While none of them are huge tasks they might take 20, 30 or 45 minutes a piece. If I knock them off quickly on Saturday morning it leaves the day free to focus on my family. I can then focus on my evening spending some time with Mayumi and studying Japanese. I find if you keep a lot of these little tasks hanging over your head it becomes daunting and actually really drives your productivity down.

For readers of mine that are really busy, I would love to know how you keep everything balanced.

Today's Configuration: Leica M9-P Summilux 50mm f/1.4 and Summilux 35mm f/1.4

If you come to Tokyo keep an eye out for this graffiti. It is done by an artist named 281_Anti nuke. He is a very outspoken artist on the Japanese Government and the handling of the Fukushima Disaster. Vice Japan did a very interesting documentary on him. Make sure to turn on English subtitles.

More protests in Shibuya...

Beautiful but very impractical car for Tokyo...

RIP. Safely coned off to show respect...

Mayumi and I had a great date last weekend in Harajuku...

Slightly interrupted by the black vans making a nuisance of themselves...

Great use of space...

Mayumi gave my new 50mm a try... great shot!

We headed over to the Line Friends Store. Line is a social network/messaging app not well known in the US but is absolutely massive in Asia. It's hard to explain but basically as you text you can send these really funny animated stamps to each other. Mayumi, Kai and I communicate on it all the time. I use it on my phone and Mac all the time. They have a character store in Harajuku. We stopped in to pick up a bunch of things for Kai. I spent far too much money.

One of the annoying things I had to deal with this week was a pretty popular website in Japan using my images without my permission. I often do a Google image search on my more popular images by uploading them to the Google Image Search bar to see where they are showing up. Sometimes people are kind enough to tell me when they find my images on another site. I even once found a Facebook page by someone who is posting all of my images as they are his own. I searched on his name and found a bunch of non-English/non-Japanese websites where he submitted them as his work. I tried to contact him on Facebook and ask him to stop but he blocked me once I did.

Sadly I find my images being used all of the time. Most of the time I let it go and just ask them to credit me and provide a link to ShootTokyo. If it is a really popular site I ask them to license the image. This particular website was basically using images from so many people and mentioning there name below the photo and providing a link. Taking the 'we are giving you credit and exposure' approach. Typically this is OK if you are personal blog but not OK for a website owned by a large company. It's not legal. I emailed them and they said they read my License Agreement Page and thought they were not violating it as they were giving me credit. I said I could see their point and now understand their approach and philosophy to intellectual property on the web. I asked them to confirm that they would be OK if I started copying all of their text from their site (of course giving them credit and a back link) and using it with my images on ShootTokyo to create articles. It would be a much faster and cheaper way for me to create content for ShootTokyo than needing to write all of my blog posts myself. Surprisingly they were not OK with this approach and we were able to resolve the use of my images rather quickly. If you ever find my images being used please let me know.

Thanks for stopping by today...