Bulletins on new products, special offers and other news in our web shops
After years of doom and gloom with discontinuation announcements, Fujifilm have issued a statement about the re-release of the famed Neopan Acros in 35mm and 120 Format scheduled for fall this year.
This is an exciting development and of course it will be available in our web store.
To purchase in 120 format please click here and for 135 format here.
While we are eagerly awaiting the release and shipment of the new MS Optics (former MS Optical) MS Apoqualia-G/Apolia-G 35/f1.4 lens, Tokyo premium camera boutique Map Camera has announced a lens named MS Optics Reiroal 35/f1.4, which is now available for pre-order exclusively on the Map Camera web site at the price of ￥143,800.
The Map Original lens is limited to 100 pieces and is produced in a very attractive “platinum chrome plated” finish, including a vented MS Smart Hood. Map have also put together a nice special feature page around Mr Miyazaki’s lens craft, which offers some behind the scene photos on how the lenses are made in his basement workshop. The site also explains the origin of the lens name. It is based on a poem called “Aomori Elegy” composed in the 1920s as part of “Spring and Shura” poetry, where the term “Reiro lens” appeared in one episode, which Map Camera have then based the lens name on.
We hope you find these MS Optics lens news of interest and welcome questions or comments.
For those wishing to be placed on a notification list for the Apoqualia 35/f1.4 lens which is set for release in October, please register on the product listing page.
In 2010, Mr Sadayasu Miyazaki of MS Optical designed and manufactured the MS OPTICAL SUPER TRIPLET PERAR 3.5/35Â for Leica M mount.
Since then, many hundreds of these tiny wonders have been sold and reached the camera bodies of people all over the world. This is not limited to the original 35mm focal length, as later a 28mm, 24mm and most recently a 21mm super-wide Perar followed suit.
At Japan Exposures, we would like to celebrate this and are calling all photographers who have taken pictures using this Super Tpirlet Triplet lens. Our aim is to collect images from everyone and everwhere, then to pick the 100 best images and put them in a printed book to be handed to Mr Miyazaki (alert: this is a surprise and he does not know about this yet!). That way he can see how far his creations have travelled and what people have captured with them.
Japan Exposures was founded in 2004 and was the first site offering photo equipment, lens conversions, films and camera & parts sourcing from Japan. Since the beginning, we have been very happy to be able to work with Mr Miyazaki. This little project is meant to be a token of appreciation to him and his work.
We hope that you share this sentiment and would like to invite you to participate by submitting your photograph(s) to us. We will keep you informed on the developments of this endevour and at a later stage you will have the opportunity to purchase the book yourself.
You will find practical guidance below on how to submit your material.
Thank you and please spread the word to all “Perargraphers”!
Editing— We are no longer accepting submissions and are editing entries for including in the book. Thanks!
We will use Flickr to manage submissions. If you don’t use or like Flickr, please email us.
Over the last few days we’ve been adding quite a few new titles to the bookstore, and I wanted to highlight a few of them for you:
Another Country in New York Fascimile Edition (Signed)
Daido Moriyama
This is a complete facsimile reprint of Daido Moriyama’s 1974 self-published photocopied book of the same name which originated out of his famed “printing show” exhibitions (which in the last couple of years he has reprised in New York, London, and elsewhere). At the time they were issued, only around 100 versions — no two exactly alike — were issued. These facsimile reprints are available in two cover versions — “Stars and Stripes” (pictured), and “Airplane” — and while certainly not cheap, they are an order of magnitude cheaper than what some booksellers would like you to pay for one of the 1974 originals. Available here.
Ever After
Asako Narahashi
Asako Narahashi has released several small print books since her breakthrough 2007 half awake and half asleep in the water (Nazraeli Press), but this can be considered her first major book since that release, and it sees her continuing to explore the relationship between water and land, or put another way, between a floating indeterminateness and the grounded elements which dominate the landscape. The images in Ever After were shot in Japan, Dubai, Amsterdam, the suburbs of Paris, Santa Monica, Taipei, and elsewhere, between 2002 and 2011. Narahashi explains at the beginning of the interview that accompanies the book (included separately as a booklet), “I think I’ve always had an interest in things which lack a stable state, at least unconsciously perhaps. Although I’m not particularly aware of other people’s shore photography, most seem to be images taken of water as something beautiful. […] In my case, I took these because I wanted to capture something that gives a sense of scale, or artificiality, somewhere in the image, not because I wanted to get closer to nature.” This is a nice large-size book complete with slipcase and the aforementioned interview booklet (bilingual). Available here.
Standard Temperature
Masayo Ito
Masayo Ito’s Standard Temperature, a collection of family portraits taken between 1979-1981, began its life as a student project for Ito when she was a BFA student at Musashino Art University’s Department of Visual Communication Design in Tokyo. In fact, it was her graduation thesis and garnered her the Department’s “Laboratory Prize”. Her biography characterizes Standard Temperature as “photos from random visits with Tokyo families”, which would imply she just pounded on apartment flats randomly until she found subjects willing to sit for portraits. The results, however, belie such arbitrariness, and without any background knowledge — Ito’s own afterword is itself ambiguous about who these people are — one feels sure that even if not Ito’s own friends and family, Ito must have known these people fairly well to capture them as intimately as she has done. Available here.
Berlin
Hiromi Tsuchida
Hiromi Tsuchida is best known for his exploration of the effects of Japan’s postwar economic boom in Zokushin and Counting Grains of Sand. However, he has also devoted a considerable body of work exploring the WWII-scarred cities of Hiroshima and Berlin, producing at least three books on the former, and two on the latter. These works often feature photos taken over different periods which are then juxtaposed, or as in the case of his first Berlin book The Berlin Wall, by digitally superimposing the words “East” and “West” to note which part of the wall was which. The 2011 book entitled simply Berlin brings together photographs of Berlin shot at three different points of his career, and critically, three different and distinct periods in Berlin’s post-WWII history — 1983, 1999-2000, and 2009. As Rei Masuda writes in one of the book’s two accompanying essays, “The three periods at which Tsuchida was shooting in Berlin correspond to three phases in the history of the Berlin Wall: existence, disappearance, and memory.” Available here.
In addition to the new titles in the store, we’ve recently added some book spread photos for the following titles:
Record No. 23 (Signed), by Daido Moriyama
In recent years Fuji has released some well-received film cameras, both for their functionality as well as for their looks. Their latest — the Instax Mini 90 Neo Classic instant film camera that hit the streets on September 20th — looks to continue this trend.
No matter if it is just looks or function, the level of interest in this camera is enormous, as seen in this post on John Sypal’s Tokyo Camera Style.
One nice and very contemporary thing about this camera is that it features a rechargeable Lithium battery as opposed to the throw-away alkaline batteries that Fuji’s other instant film cameras take. What’s more, Japan Exposures is pleased to confirm that unlike a lot of Lithium batteries, this particular battery can be shipped with the camera (provided that certain transport conditions are met, which Japan Exposures will comply with). We can also confirm that the instruction sheets included with the camera have English sections (in addition to several other languages, and Japanese of course). Funnily enough, early commenters on Japanese user sites have complained that there are too many instructions for the camera — go figure!
Some other features worth noting over previous Instax models are various shooting modes, such as macro mode, double exposure mode, a bulb mode (for up to 10 second long exposures), kids mode (freezing fast action), party mode (slow synch flash to balance fore- and background), landscape mode (high depth of field) and flash fine tune facility.
As of right now, no release date has been mentioned for the camera outside of Japan, so the time is now if you want to get one — perhaps to make sure you are covered early with a Xmas present to yourself, or a Instax person near you.
Fuji has understandably been laying on the “retro” vibe thick in its promotional material for the camera, as can be seen in this jazzy promotional video:
We have the camera in stock and ready to ship.
The MS Optical lens MS Optical 50/1.13 Sonnetar continues to be popular, in fact so popular that the complete initial batch of 200 Sonnetar lenses is now sold out.
The following lenses are on the horizon for later this year and early 2014 and beyond:
We hope you find these MS Optical lens news of interest and welcome questions or comments.
For those wishing to be placed on a notification list, please comment below in this post and we will notify you accordingly.
Japan Exposures including our Web and Book Stores will take a holiday starting July 11th until the end of July. The cut-off for Hirano hand-made camera cases will be late June. Orders placed on or after these dates will be processed and shipped upon our return in August.
Orders for products that are currently backordered might also be shipped in August. We will make every effort to inform customers with pending order accordingly to manage expectations.
Please note that replies to email inquiries might also be delayed accordingly. We apologise for any inconvenience.
The holiday will affect the web and book stores and the following products and services, which will resume from early August:
Thank you for your understanding and we wish you a pleasant summer with many photographs to take and to look at.
