Happy New Year! Welcome to 2015. I hope you enjoyed your New Year's celebrations. Mayumi and I just stayed in and enjoyed each others company. For those of us in my generation we grew up watching the movie Back to the Future. In Back to the Future II Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to 2015 to prevent Marty's son from going to jail. 2015 is a world with flying cars and hover boards. While we don't have flying cars...Google is working on driverless cars and hover board protypes were successfully funded on Kickstarter last month via the Hendo Hoverboard Project.

Welcome to the future!

Like last year and the year before I like to sit down and set my goals for the year on January 1st. It is a great way to get my head straight on what my focus areas and objectives are for the year. I am the type of person that works really well when I have goals set. I am a very active person and can often distract myself so having goals ensures you have a rudder to keep you on course. Notice I said goals and not resolutions.

Resolutions to me are a bit softer and they also tend to be very declarative statements. I will lose 10 pounds! vs. I will get in better shape. I will study Japanese every day vs. I will work on improving my Japanese. I will take pictures every day vs. I will dedicate more time to photography. You end up working towards the resolution vs. the purpose or spirit of the resolution.

I find goals more flexible and something that can be adjusted throughout the year to keep you working toward the objective. In 2012 I set a goal to publish ShootTokyo: The Book then I realized I wasn't really in a position to publish the book. I had far too much work to do on my Lightroom Library. If I focused simply on ensuring I hit the resolution I would have rushed to put out a substandard book. Rather I adjusted my goal to focus on prepping my images and positioning myself to accomplish that goal the following year. I kept myself working toward the spirit of the goal.

Don't get me wrong. I still believe in setting numbers behind the goals but I use them as guides to measure progresses and ensure that I am on the right trajectory. Last year I set a goal to double visits to ShootTokyo. I only grew traffic 70% but that's OK as I was happy with the progress I was making. I didn't have enough time to shoot post more images with all of the obligations of my new job. I adjusted the goal vs. doing some unnatural things like splitting up my posts to drive more traffic.

For 2015 I revisited my goals a bit and I decided I am going with a simple goal to enjoy photography and this hobby I have...

On to today's blog post!

Today's Configuration: Leica M9-P with a Nocitlux 50mm f/0.95 and a Summilux 21mm f/1.4

Quiet streets on New Year's Day...

I did my yearly ritual of checking out the local temple...

At first I was frustrated by the long dark shadows when taking this picture but then I remembered when you have strong elements you can't change make them work in your photo. I this case I ended up moving forward a bit and making sure my shadow was more prominent in the photo.

Secretly I like to go the shrine each year so I can photograph the ema wooden signs. Each year the animal changes to the zodiac sign for the year. This year is sheep.