I started to write only in Spanish, then in English and at that time this was the reason of that decision. After some time I felt that something is missing. Language has it’s constraints to express a thought, it’s not perfect but it includes something special that the simple translation process cannot perform: The culture of a country.

Around a month ago I decided to write in Japanese, Italian and Catalan. Just the translation process is a lot of work! Anyway I thought that it’s worth it because it will give me the opportunity to put them in practice and improve them as more posts are written. After a month I reached another conclusion that I didn’t expect at the starting point. Translation is not the point. To reach every culture is the point! The only way to do it is to write what is going to be interesting to every set of people speaking that very language. For example, when I get out with some Italian friends, after some time we talk about topics that I would never talk if I’d surrounded by Spanish or Americans or just a group of many foreigners. Blogging is the same. It’s just a way to talk in a public square, in this case my square called zuco.org to an audience of people, some days few of them, some days many of them. This means that a post that might be really interesting for Japanese people maybe is not interesting for Italians or vice-versa. By the way, for English and Spanish it’s hard to reach a specific culture due the non homogeneous cultural backgrounds that surround those languages. Thousands of people all around the world speak English and Spanish and all of them come from different countries. Some of them use those languages as natives, and many others just learnt the language at school or by themselves, specially English.

I’m really interested to see how this experiment is going to evolve in one year. I hope to improve those languages and I hope to control the internal fight in mind between them that tries to make me mix Italian, Spanish, English or Catalan. Sometimes not only words or expressions tend to mix each other but cultural concepts that could make a text, perfectly written, from a grammatical point of view, mix as well. Thus, making them hard to understand from a cultural perspective.

Akahige is a masterpiece of the Japanese film history, but we can find another masterpiece known for all of us: 7nin no samurai (the seven samurai). Again, starring Mifune. Here the story takes place during “sengoku jidai”, the period of time in which Japan was in middle of fearful wars. A gang bandits approach a village with the purpose of taking everything from them. As the villagers know this, decide to look for help. They only can pay with food. They find seven samurai (in this case ronin, because they don’t have a master) and go to the village to help the villagers.

This film provided a great bunch of the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven, starring Yul Brinner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, etc. Calvera, the name of the village, is often visited by bandits. The villagers, desperate, go the the neighbor village for asking for help, and they recruit seven men to help them. Does it sound to you?

I think the ending dialog for both films is something like: “the villagers always won. We lost. We always lose.”

Yojimbo is another masterpiece of Kurosawa starring Mifune, again. This film took its inspiration into the american Westerns, to be more precise, it took the inspiration in the films of John Ford (if I’m correct). Here, a lonely ronin (a samurai without master) arrives to a town divided with lords who make money from gambling. Mifune convinces each lord so that he becomes the guardian to protect them from the other party. Does it sound to you?

Let’s take a look to the spaghetti westerns. Sergio Leone made a great star from Clint Eastwood. Do you remember a film called A Fistful of Dollars??? (Original title in Italian: Per un pugno di dollari). Well, Leone made a non-official re-make of Yojimbo. (Btw, this films were record in Southern Spain!!!). Well, it went to a lawsuit that Kurosawa finally won (because of obvious reasons). The only way to discover that is to rent both films and watch them :D

If you want to know more about these five films (if you decide to watch the 7 samurai or Yojimbo you should also do so with the magnificent seven and A Fistful of Dollars so that you can appreciate differences and similitudes), I recommend you to go to your nearest DVD rental shop and spend a wonderful weekend enjoying quality cinema.

In this work I could appreciate the instinct that moves the heart of a photographer to show the world which appeared to his eyes. This is the need to express our own feelings trough a light hunting machine as a camera. Camerota is showing here that instinct, that strong need to bring to our eyes what he catches with his own eyes, and what he felt in that moments, walking down hundred of streets all over the Japanese islands.

Here you have some pictures that show just a small part of this great work.

You can explore more about Camerota’s work at his company his Graffiti Japan work and his flickr account.

So I created a new group on flickr, the Macro Hackers group. Why hackers? Because everything is acceptable to create Macro photography on that group. From hand-made-macros to professional and expensive equipment. The important thing is to use the imagination to catch that part of the small world that escapes from our daily life.

The movie takes out the breath and the action, effects and dynamic are fantastic.

Check the webs of the participants, more pictures, their reviews and more info:

Danny Choo – CEO Mirai Inc
Steven Nagata – Photographer, Tech Specialist, Writer.
JonnyLi – Photographer.
Joseph Tame – Pod Caster, Photographer.
iMorpheus – Photographer.
Frankiebit – Journalist, Tech Specialist.
Mika Ueno – Pro Investor Relations & Corporate Marketing, Photographer.
Ryan Pipkin – Sales Executive, Entrepreneur.
Florian Von Bock – Software Dev.

Drops of water and a mysterious fluid over a metallic surface. For your information the metallic surface comes from a Sun E-250

Thanks to the organizers for creating such an interesting event: Andrew Shuttleworth and Danny Choo

Some pictures of the event. In a later post I will talk about the blogs and people that I met that night:

I was lucky to catch the moment…

More pictures at flickr

More pictures and info from some participants:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenagata/
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/tokyo_cgm_night_episode_5
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonnyli/sets/72157619750455267/
Tokyo CGM Episode #5

1. We cannot control the aperture (f-stop) using the camera controls and
2. we cannot control the focus mechanism.

The way I found to make it (this is not my discovering, I’m sure someone else has already noticed this) is a little more intrusive with the lens. You actually have to dedicate a lens for this only purpose, so please don’t do it with expensive ones. I bought this one as a junk lens for 1000 yen, that is around 6 euros. The interesting part is that you can control the aperture directly with camera controls, which is a really convenient thing, believe me!

Buy a normal and inexpensive wide angle lens. For example using this Nikkor 18-55mm. The wider the lens is, the closer you can shot.

Take out the plastic ring. It’s just sticked over the lens

There are four screws. These screws are used to fix the focus lens in the front. This first lens is used mainly for focus purposes. Because we are not able to focus this piece of crystal is useless. What we need is the other one, under this first lens. So let’s take it out and leave it in a secure place to use it in a future project :)

This is the lens I was talking before. Just remove it and leave your final creation with a big whole inside. The funny thing is that people not always realize that you just removed the front part. I remember that one guy told me “Hey you’ve lost the front part of your lens!!” ^^;

Here you can see the diaphragm. Instead of using it manually as in the previous article you can just fix the lens in a normal way, using the f-mount system and control the aperture from the camera.

Don’t worry about the auto focus. Anyway you are going to use it manually. The way to focus with this lens is moving the camera near or far from the object. This kind of macros has a really tiny deep of field so the only way to avoid this, in case you want to make the image as much sharp as you can, is to use a small aperture with an f-stop of 20 or more.

After shotting some 10yen coin I noticed a strange reflection in the picture. After spending some time figuring out where the hell that reflection came from (you can see it in the left side of the picture), finally I realized that it was due a plastic membrane around the second lens inside the lens-body. It’s a membrane maybe used to avoid reflections that could come back from the plastic components against the focus lens (the one we took out before). In this case we don’t need that membrane so just after taking it away the reflection was gone (see the right one).

The membrane I was talking before, is located around the second lens as indicated by the red color in the picture.

This is an example of what you can achieve with this macro. It’s huge and you need a good light source to work with it at f-stops of 20 or above.

The Otaku Encyclopedia is a book written by Patrick W. Galbraith. The party was held by Kodansha International LTD to celebrate the release of the Otaku Encyclopedia.

Danny Choo and Patrick W. Galbraith

Here Ken Brady of Genki.com

Yuko Morita associate editor of Kodansha International LTD

Steven Nagata took a lot great pictures of the event

Danny thinking about the Empire…

She was really cute. I like her face silhouette. I would like to take more pictures of her. I don’t know your name, if you want feel free to contact me

I don’t know what Jonny Li is doing…

Joseph Tame, Paul Papadimitriou, Jonny Li, Steven Nagata

Not in the picture, also Francesco , Derek Arnwine and Héctor García were there.

Some more pics at Flickr set

More pictures and info about last nigh here:

Danny Choo: www.dannychoo.com
Steven Nagata: www.thewesternworld.net
Paul Papadimitriou: www.papadimitriou.jp
Jonny Li: www.jonnyli.com
Ken Lee: www.kenleewrites.com
Lester Ho: www.lesterho.com