I am in Tokyo for the weekend after 3 weeks of travel to Palm Springs, San Francisco, Tampa and Sydney. Sadly I am catching the red eye at mid-night tonight out of Haneda heading to Singapore for the week. I am back to Sydney the second half of next week as well. The first half of the year is always a lot of travel for me but this has been more than usual and 22,935 miles later I am getting ready to leave again. Aside from my trips to Singapore and Sydney mentioned above I have another trip to San Francisco and Singapore as well as a personal to Kyoto - finally! Travel at this pace can be exhausting. A lot of people who don't travel heavy for a living really don't understand the toll it takes on you and that you really have very little free time to yourself while you are traveling. Sydney was a last minute extension on my trip and I took it at the last minute and ended up with middle seats on all three of my flights. Just over 24 hours door to door in the middle seat. Yuck!

I have been shooting a lot of film lately so you will be seeing some less than real time posts here. I am really enjoying shooting it. I just turned in 5 rolls to get developed. I am excited to see what I get back next weekend. I really enjoy the anticipation and surprise when I am reminded of what I captured. Often I get back images that you didn't think would turn out well but actually do. I love seeing images again that I forgot I took. All of this is the really enjoyable part of shooting film for me. I think I have a self imposed amount of pressure to shoot so I have images to post here on ShootTokyo and shooting film removes at lot of that for me as I know process will take a least a week. Well at least B&W takes a week. I can usually get color back the same day in Tokyo.

When I was in San Francisco over the weekend I met up with a colleague and his family and shot some family portraits for him around Yerba Buena Garden Park. It is small but beautiful park in downtown San Francisco.

Today's configuration: Leica M Monochrom with various Leica lenses

I am amazed at the amount of construction going on in San Francisco. It is booming!

I was lucky to catch up with my friend Richard and his lovely wife Marcia for dim sum while in San Francisco. I took my favorite photograph the day after the Jay Maisel Workshop from Richard's apartment in San Francisco. I love catching up with Richard. Seeing how successful he has been in life just reminds me that I need to work harder.

Richard wanted to try out my M-Monochrom and snapped this photo of me. Thanks!

Another colleague of mine and fellow photographer was traveling in San Francisco and we decided to catch up one evening for a short photowalk...

It was during Chinese New Year and I was staying fairly close so we headed over to Chinatown to see what was going on...

We wanted to be respectful and celebrate the local traditions so we picked up a pile of fireworks!

I don't think I have played with fireworks in 25 years but it was so much fun...

Lots of people starting to watch...

From all sides... it was a ton of fun and $25 dollars well spent.

I ordered a bunch of new ShootTokyo buttons and stickers while in the US. I give them away when I bump into other photographers while out shooting. As I get asked this question a lot: Yes I will mail them to you. If you send me $15 via PayPal to dave [at] shoottokyo.com to cover the shipping costs from Japan I'll drop a fist full in the mail to you or find me on the streets of Tokyo!