I returned from my trip to Tokyo a couple of days ago now.  Spent the weekend both recuperating as well as celebrating my son’s 19th birthday.  Recuperating from six solid days of walking and exploring and photographing Tokyo.  Day and night – I slept very little. Add to that a couple of flights with very little sleep and yes I was very tired upon my return. We celebrated my son’s birthday at home with a few of his good friends over and then a family lunch on Sunday – all in all a very nice weekend. I also took a little time over the weekend to download all of my photos from my SD cards to my hard drive – as well as create a back up copy of the RAW files on a separate drive just to be safe.

As for the trip? It was amazing! Simply incredible! Tokyo never fails to surprise me, embrace me and elevate my view of the city, its culture and of course its people.  I had some truly memorable experiences and explored many parts of Tokyo that I had not discovered on my previous trips.  Fortunately I photographed everything, so I have those memories to last me forever in more ways than one. I was equal parts glad and sad to return home. I was missing my kids and as I mentioned was getting tired out.  But there is so much more that I want to explore in Tokyo – and Japan for that matter. But this trip has satisfied my thirst for Tokyo and Japan…for now.

It is now Monday and my youngest is back at school and I have some time to sit and contemplate what is next.  As mentioned I have downloaded the images and there are just over 6,000 of them! Eep! I have started the editing process and am really happy with the images that I have captured. The images I have included with this blog are some of the ones that I downloaded from my camera to my iPhone and shared online whilst in Tokyo.

Right now I am not going to go into any more detail about my trip and the specific experiences I had or what I achieved each day, etc.  And that is because I have a lot of sorting out and much more planning to do.  That is a lot of images and obviously I won’t just go and dump them all on my Facebook page in an album.  So what should I do with them?  I mentioned in my last blog that I had some themes in mind before I travelled to Tokyo.  Now, looking back at my experiences and the images I captured, some of those themes may form some specific pieces of work, but others won’t.  I need to finish the editing first and get a feel for the flow of my images.

Obviously I want to blog about my trip, my daily journals, my experiences, how my camera gear performed, what I learnt about my photography and much more.  But aside from my musings on this site, there are some other outcomes that I want to achieve.  In the past two years I have developed high quality photo books – the printed and hard cover bound type.  These have been great but generally you might show family once and then you shelve them.  So I am looking at other ways to group and display my work. Should I make a series of zines (small magazines) with specific themes? Do I make these available for purchase from interested people? I will also likely choose one or two images to print and frame in large-scale.  I have done this after the previous two trips.  Or should I print and frame a larger number of smaller sized prints – perhaps to hold an exhibition?

Lots to think about, plan and prepare before I even make a true start.  But I wanted to touch base here and share a couple of early edits.  Like I said, this was an incredible trip and I believe was a really good balance of experiences, photography and also some time for me. Stay tuned for more of my Tokyo 2017 travel stories and images.  Happy shooting.