Beach Culture

Recently my friends and I made a plan to go to the beach.
I was excited and nervous at the same time. In the process of preparing to go to the beach, I found myself asking around what do people normally do when they go to the beach.


Going to the beach has been a big deal for me. I grew up in a prefecture that is well known to NOT have any coast in Japan. The times I have been to the beach was when I was young and on a family holiday or with friends when I was at university.

The beach was something that I always imagined before I went to sleep to calm myself down. I secretly like the beach as much as my bedroom floor was yellow and my ceiling was blue like the sky.  I love the sea breeze which makes you feel that you are free from all of the bad things and I love seeing the sun setting or it rising in the horizon. It felt romantic even for a 16 year old girl. The beach was somewhere special for me.

For my friends here in Australia, I think it is not be that special to go to the beach that it is for me. It is something that is just normal and casual, a thing that people do daily. "Let's go to the beach" is almost equivalent to saying "let's go the cinemas" or even "let's go out for a coffee". They have that geological accessibility to be able to have it in their normal day to day life.  

I think it is just the difference of growing up closer or far way from the beach.
I did not have that culture to casually say "Are you free this weekend? Let's go to the beach!" but if I lived near the beach even in Japan, I might have not felt or recognized the beach culture that I have came a cross. This might be considered to be a culture shock but I think it is not a international culture shock but more of a geological culture shock.

Going to the beach can still be something special. I just need to make it a special thing that I do often :)

I hope I am making sense.

See you soon!
Ellen

Beautiful old Camera shop on Leeds

I was living in Leeds UK studying for a year between 2013 and 2014.

One day I went to explore the city and I went to the Corn Exchange.
Now the building is used for vintage fairs and events there but most of the time there are small shops there.



Of course, there were some vintage shops but the shop that caught my attention was a camera shop. I really like cameras. I might not have all of the the knowledge about camera's memorized in my head but I experiment with the shutter speed and the aperture. I like experimenting.

 

This shop mostly second hand cameras and some were film cameras. They had a variety of accessories for cameras. I had to go in and have a look at everything!
I was really interested in the lenses that they had. I mostly have been using the 18-55mm lens that I bought with the body of my Pentax K-5. I have borrowed my mother's lenses and I really wanted to own my own.

In the end I bought these two lenses: Pentax Zoom 75-150mm and Pentax 50mm.
Both of them are manual focus and they cost 40 pounds for both of them which I was really happy with!

Since I got them I have been having fun with them and I have taken interesting photographs with them :)


This was a story about a shop for an old camera shop in Leeds.

See you soon!
Ellen