It was on a Thursday afternoon while I was teaching my regular 4pm-5pm Kindergarten kids lesson at my house that the door bell rang. It was the postman, he had a package for me from a guy named Michael in Tochigi-ken. I wondered what could it be, the only people we know in Tochigi are a couple of Japanese ladies. I came back into the class and the 3 students all wanted to see what it was so I opened it. It was film, to my surprise all the students knew what it was too. I think few 5 year olds in Australia would know what film is these days. In Japan although they invent all the new technology, a lot of older people don't change, so film is still popular with older people, so everyone's grand parents are still shooting film (unless they are real photography maniacs, then they'll have a Canon 1Ds MkIII or Nikon D3X + 400 f/2.8 lens!). They even still sell music on cassette in Japan, but only oldies music like Enka or Classical (I like both those styles too, but whenever I bought it's been on CD).
Earlier on in the year I received an old medium format camera from a friend's uncle (a Mamiya RB67), but I was only able to shoot two rolls of film with it due to being on a tight budget. Medium format costs about 4x the amount per shot than 35mm (that's when I add the film + development + scanning costs together). When Sam C heard that I hadn't been able to shoot with the RB67 for a few months, he kindly offered to help me out. Thinking that sending film all the way from the USA to Japan, might get x-rayed to death, he asked Michael in Tochigi for help to send some films to me. So now I've been able to shoot some more medium format. I want to send out a big thank you to Sam and Michael.
At the moment you can see some of my shots from the RB67 here, but I'm planning something for my PBase site in the near future.