Hagi Jokamachi details

I am reluctant to call myself a photographer. Of course in the simplest sense a photographer is someone who takes photos, so  obviously I, like almost all of us, are photographers, but if a photographer is someone with technical camera skills then I would not be able to call myself a photographer.

I only have the most rudimentary knowledge of such things as f-stops, focal lengths, etc and most of my photos are taken using the auto settings of my camera. All these photos were taken with a relatively cheap "point and shoot" camera. Expensive cameras and lenses would be wasted on me.

I also take photos very quickly. I don't spend much time setting up shots. I wander around going click, click, click at whatever attracts my eye. Often what attracts my eye are details..... textures, patterns of light and shade, compositions of simple intersecting lines. I am a very simple photographer.

I am often complemented on my "eye", and asked how it is I "see" the things I photograph. Its kind of a difficult question because my subjects are simply there staring me in the face. In fact I would say they call out to me. What exactly is going on is really not all that clear to me except I would have to say it is a matter of simply looking.

Simply looking would mean allowing my consciousness to focus in my eyes rather than in my head. I think it means not thinking, not expecting, and not listening to the chatter of words around and in me. In essence, I think, it means shutting up.

These are some of the things I saw while wandering around the samurai district of Hagi for an hour.