Tag: Yamaguchi

2026 Photo Club Exhibition

I’m a member of a photo club, the Hikari Shayukai, and we have a public exhibition at a local park every spring.

This year’s just finished, so it’s time for a bit of reflection.

Unlike past years, the exhibition this time was held the week after the annual ume blossom festival, so we knew from the start that attendance would be lower than usual. Oh top of that, we had heavy rain three days out of five. The Saturday and Sunday were sunny, luckily, but still we had less than half the 1,000 or so we usually get.

Still, people did show up, and I had some very interesting interactions with guests over my pictures.

Here are the pictures I showed, and stuffed of the thoughts I have on them now.

Haniwa

This picture was taken atop a local kofun, or ancient burial mound. I like the colors of the clay haniwa against the blue sky. The biggest reaction to this one was surprise at the location. Even people who live in the town where it was taken didn’t seem to know the mound was there.

Fire Dragon

This is a bit of a miracle picture. I had my son hold a lit sparkler-type firework and move it while I took a long exposure, and this is the shape it took.

Reactions to this were mostly bafflement. What is it? How did you take it? But there was a lot of wonder about it, which is mostly what I wanted.

Sundown

This seemed to have a lot of impact. The vibrance of the colors and the banding of the sky, along with the sunstar, really caught people’s eyes. But what got me was how many people wanted to know exactly where I took it, down to the name of the little island at the right edge of the photo.

I don’t know the name. I’m not sure if it matters?

Traffic

I’m not even sure how to explain this. I took it through the window of a double decker sightseeing bus rolling through Roppongi, Tokyo. I wanted to catch the chaos of the night lights and the feeling of the big city at night. I mostly just wanted to play around with light.

Most people just ignored it, but some seemed almost entranced by it. I got a lot of guys with cameras asking how I took it, and why. They got up close and seemed to try to decipher each pixel.

I’m ok with that reaction.

It’s always great to get the reactions of non-photographers to my pictures. It gets clarify my successes and failures.

And it just feels more meaningful to show prints like that

My First Japanese Talk

I’m using that term “talk” cautiously, because I’ve had public effects and appeared on TV in Japanese before, but in terms of “standing at a podium giving a prepared presentation in Japanese,” my first time was October 21st, 2025.

A small audience of older Japanese people sitting on folding chairs in a gymnasium-style hall.
The Crowd

The Hikari Community Development Support Center, which hosts local clubs and plans public events, invited me to be part of their annual local seminar series. I think my book and city newspaper column caught their eye, but it might also be that two former students from my business English days are on staff.

Whatever the case, I was scheduled to speak from 10 to 11:30, with a short break in the middle. I prepared a two-part talk, “Rediscovering Yamaguchi Prefecture.” The name is a play on my old TV segment, and featured since if the things I love most about this place.

Mostly, it was some of my favorite pictures taken here. Most of them are on this site somewhere.

I also included a segment on local sake, of course.

I’d say it went pretty well, but my Q&A segment ended up being way too long because I was just too damned tired to keep talking. And no one wanted to ask questions.

Anyway, they took a survey of the audience afterwards and the reaction was really good.

A Japanese language survey.
Survey response rate 96% (50/52 people)
Seminar rating: 42% Very Good, 54% Good, 2% Average.

I had a bunch of 2L sized prints left over from photo club meetings that I put out for people to take home and almost all were give afterwards, so that’s felt good, too.

It was a lot of fun, but lord, how draining…