Beaverton, OR.

A few months ago, I tried my second attempt at my game matsuri idea. I wanted to revisit it at some point, using some props that I had forgotten about.

I ended up taking about two hours to build the set, and another four to shoot. I was pretty frustrated by my tripod, which had a minimum height because of a shaft on it, and for a lot of the street level shots, they were taken on a couple of soda boxes. However, the tripod was a huge boon because there were some twenty second exposures going on; turns out, I’m married to 100 ISO.

There’s several neat elements happening with the set here: first, the main boulevard has been laid out like a roulette table, and every roulette table needs a zero – I used kabufuda, an 8, 9, and 3, which is a hand worth zero points in a game called Oicho-Kabu. Coincidentally, this is where the Yakuza gets their name from. There’s also a shogi king being checkmated in an alleyway, an artist painting another shogi piece, a riichi mahjong hand called thirteen orphans, as well as numerous other details throughout.

In addition, with clever editing and methods of capture, there’s weather now! I was delighted to see that it came out quite well.

Though a lot of this was frustrating, I think I’m fairly-well satisfied by the end product. There’s eight pictures in here, please see them all!

Thanks for seeing my work!