Day 6 - Rain & Reflections in Shinjuku

Day 6 - Rain & Reflections in Shinjuku

Waking up still early-ish. But quite foggy in the morning, clouds are low and humidty is high.

Decide to take a local stroll around breakfast places, and settle for the one cafe I've been before, having the same toast and coffee with an egg.

See that the weather is about to make a turn, so don't explore further yet, and go get my raincoat.

The rain starts, and does not stop for the next 8 hours or so.

Use the opportunity to catch up on work, do laundry and go to the local supermarket to buy some lunch, including more soft boiled eggs and snacks for later.

After a few conversations, a friend says we should go for a shoot around Shinjuku, as he wants to buy a camera lense from a specific shop.

I decide to take him on the offer, and plan my way so I can catch my work meetings in a cafe nearby. It's called Caffice, and everything is priced in for using it as more of an office, than a real cafe. 900 yen for coffee or 900 year for beer, and it gives you 2 hours of use of space.

After the calls, I head to the Map Camera Shop. The shop is full of opportunities, new or old, second hand or even absolutely broken, Leica or any other type of camera... and just outside a fantastic neon sign lights up the entire street, ready for people to take as many photos as they can.

Before shooting, there's a specific Tsukemen place we wanted to try, small queue but we're fast inside in about 10 minutes. The portions are enormous by Japanese standards, and the flavour is intense.

So we begin the night, him having a full map of interesting spots, we go to the furthest one and make our way back to inner streets of Shinjuku, and the tiny bars around Golden Gai. Some spots are met with the disappointing Instagram vs Reality, or some construction instead of the desired spot, but in general all the lights are that perfect definition of what people define by Tokyo Nights.

We go further, and further taking more pictures, some with the wet puddled reflections of all the neon surrounding us, some we decide to take a few stairs up to see if we can get a better view.

In general, one of the reasons I came here was to take these night time pictures, so even though the day started with rain it ended up on a high note.

More pictures to come as they get processed

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Jamie Larson
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