It's almost sakura (cherry blossom) season again....

Hello everyone! I'm new to Steemit, so bare with me as I try to figure this space out. I'm an American living in Tokyo, Japan for the last nine years. I'm a film photographer, but I enjoy all photography. I'm not sure how I want to use this space, but if you have any advice, please feel free to leave it in the comment section. 

As the title says, it's almost sakura/cherry blossom season again here in Japan. I'm getting excited to shoot it as I'm a chronic people watcher and taking photos of interesting people in an interesting scene is what I like to do. I shot this photo two years ago at a park called Chidorigafuchi-Ryokudo in central Tokyo.

Over the last few years I’ve been getting more and more into paintings and especially those of “Belle Époque” period. Many of them are street photography in painting form. I find that very interesting and I love how they give you an insight into what day to day Paris life was like around the return of the 20th century. I would love to be a painter and make my own paints to come up with my own look to my colors and texture, but anyone that knows me well enough knows I can barely write my own name. It was a complaint of every teacher I’ve ever had. I guess that’s why I was attracted to photography. I can capture the scene in the way that I see it being beautiful, but not have to have the hand-eye coordination skill of duplicating that via paint on canvas. 

These days I’ve been trying to find every day life scenes that I think could make for an interesting painting first and trying to photograph that. More simply put; a scene full of people that tells a story. We’ll see how far this goes. I can’t promise every photo I will post will be like this, but I hope I can get enough for at least a short series. 

This photo was shot with a Minolta SRT-102 on Kodak Portra 160 film. I used a Minolta Rokkor 135mm prime lens shot at F8.