tanisnikana

in my daydreams, I want to live
in a busy, busy city, five hundred stories up
watching the traffic from my window
darting between the buildings
above and below the plaza level

where kids run and shopping gets done
in a calm and overcast warm day
the holograms splashed over the buildings
with every vibrant color, no advertisements
but art and music and wonder and beauty

and along through all this bustle
with the a-note of the flying vehicles
gliding by peacefully amongst this grandeur
i am at my window, taking it all in
looking up from my book, pen down

from my wooden chair i rise
my room as bright as outside
and my whole residence is perched
on the loft of a tea shop
greenery in every corner

and the customers come in
stressed out, in the fashions of the day
chasing that trend they can never really find
and they drink good tea, real tea, in this sincere place
with plants and flowers in every nook and cranny

the trick to this wondrous magic
is that the tea is always grown by hand
with real sunlight and real soil
by real hands doing real work
and none of it is replicated and created

and before the customers whoosh off
heading to their next meeting or their next job
they take an hour with me, and they sip
forgetting that they’re a half-mile up
and they walked on a holo-bridge to get here

for maybe just a moment i bring them peace
perhaps this is the only part of their life
done in the style of the old ways
and it’s good hard work
being a tea witch in the present day

Sometimes I do try to explore options other than just simple color and good composition. A well-composed foreboding bit of monochrome is an art too!

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I took this at the Portland Winter Lights Festival tonight and it was amazing. I usually keep my works to /c/photography, but if they capture the public interest, I'll try /c/pics.

1/200s, f/3.5, 23mm, ISO 3200. Canon EOS Rebel T7.

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Finally got out with my camera for a moment. I need to be producing more art; creating beauty is what makes me happiest.

So this is the Marquam Bridge, the most notorious bridge, the most derided bridge, the ugliest bridge. But maybe I can make it look pretty for a bit?

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Fremont Bridge seen from Overlook Park. I like how the whole picture has a suggestion of bouncing, just a bit.

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There was once a time when I didn't know how to develop my RAW files, and this was taken then. Well, now I'm pretty good at it. Took five months; this was taken at the height of summer, must have been twenty-five degrees outside on the shore.

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Hello. I'm Tanis Nikana (she/her), a photographer based in Portland, OR.

Matsuri Machi is a celebration of my childhood, idealized and seen through the lens of mixed media: traditional Japanese gaming components, alongside lego, to create a vibrant and cozy fantasy village, set atop a traditional Japanese dining table. It strongly features themes of friendship, queer relationships, and feelings of cozy fantasy. It's inspired by the dense works of Andreas Gursky, and informed by Hayao Miyazaki and Katamari Damacy.

I had a few friends help me a bit on lighting and storytelling when I realized, on my fourth attempt at doing this, that I may have been over my head. There were seven hundred takes over seven shoots, spaced over two days to give a variated feeling of weather and the advancement of time. Editing is still ongoing; these are just the first of the series.

This project was shot with a Canon EOS Rebel T7, with an 18mm-55mm lens at approximately f/5.5, but some shots went as high as f/14.

Eventually, my wife asked if we could use the dining table for food again, and I said sure.

Please enjoy Matsuri Machi; we worked hard on it. I hope it inspires feelings of peace and longing.

It wasn’t cheap, but goddammit photography is magical when it doesn’t glow and is bigger than a phone.

I love this very much.

The components from the original take were still here, so I used them just as they were. Only differences were that I had shot the original (below) with an iPhone 6+ and I shot the modern take (above) with my Canon EOS Rebel T7; and that I rotated the gaff card in the middle of the frame to be true to my intentions, as I had many regrets once I published the original work.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39229294

Hello!

When I was a child, I grew up playing older Japanese games like koi-koi, go, and later on in life once I grew older and more capable, riichi mahjong and shogi. I had an interesting childhood, being a tiny little white kid in rural Japan, not far from an air force base, back in the late eighties and early nineties. One year in my thirties, my wife picked me up a little sake shop made of lego, and I was stunned and awed.

An idea started to take shape, and to be quite frank, this is the fourth time I tried to execute on this idea. I first started attempting to shoot this series back in '21, and it was badly lit, and my flat's interior could be seen in the background of the shots. It didn't really capture a vibe that I was looking for, but it was a good proof of concept. It had hanafuda cards lining the streets and alleyways, a signature part of all the future versions to come.

What you see now here in this post is a culmination of ideas and a reflection over four years about what I had hoped to achieve with this project. There's people living their lives in this tiny little matsuri city, telling little stories as they go. It's a little dusty here and there, partially cause I don't have good ventilation, and also cause a city without a bit of grime has no good stories.

Of subtle little note here are plentiful small details: the alleyway behind the shaved ice stand has a riichi mahjong hand of thirteen orphans as fencework, with a few girls chatting on top of and next to it; a silver general and a gold general are checkmating the opposing king in an alleyway near a takoyaki shop, and there are kabufuda cards for 8-9-3, which sums to zero in a game called oicho-kabu, where the yakuza get their name from (even in this cozy fantasy village, there's still back-alley violence!). Shogi pieces lurk across the town, using it as their own battlefield, to which the residents are blissfully unaware of. The go stones have been played in a reasonably-strategic way, if there was a giant tree and a sushi cart and some people on the board, but hey, Jon Bois once depicted a gridiron football game with a Bojangles and some apartments on the field, so this too is allowed. All the sakura cards from the two hanafuda decks are all centered around the tree in the back. There are a whole lot of other details that might catch your eye too!

This couldn't have been executed so perfectly without a few of my trusted friends: Willow, on lighting and weather illumination; Marisa, on stage work, reconstruction, and clumsiness recovery; and Brenna with her excellent story-telling work--every time I'd pose a figure, she'd somehow make them even more expressive. The work of them together as a crew has pushed this project to heights I could have never thought were possible. It took three hours to build the set, another seven to shoot it over two days, and I did the editing not far away on the laptop I write this artists' guide with.

It is my sincerest hope to that this work makes you feel wistful, longing for a cozy fantasy that can't really exist. Even myself, when I look at my own work, I feel my heart get a little bit warmer at the bustling town I worked quite hard on. And thanks to you, for coming to see the heartfelt work of my crew and I!

--Tanis

Hello!

When I was a child, I grew up playing older Japanese games like koi-koi, go, and later on in life once I grew older and more capable, riichi mahjong and shogi. I had an interesting childhood, being a tiny little white kid in rural Japan, not far from an air force base, back in the late eighties and early nineties. One year in my thirties, my wife picked me up a little sake shop made of lego, and I was stunned and awed.

An idea started to take shape, and to be quite frank, this is the fourth time I tried to execute on this idea. I first started attempting to shoot this series back in '21, and it was badly lit, and my flat's interior could be seen in the background of the shots. It didn't really capture a vibe that I was looking for, but it was a good proof of concept. It had hanafuda cards lining the streets and alleyways, a signature part of all the future versions to come.

What you see now here in this post is a culmination of ideas and a reflection over four years about what I had hoped to achieve with this project. There's people living their lives in this tiny little matsuri city, telling little stories as they go. It's a little dusty here and there, partially cause I don't have good ventilation, and also cause a city without a bit of grime has no good stories.

Of subtle little note here are plentiful small details: the alleyway behind the shaved ice stand has a riichi mahjong hand of thirteen orphans as fencework, with a few girls chatting on top of and next to it; a silver general and a gold general are checkmating the opposing king in an alleyway near a takoyaki shop, and there are kabufuda cards for 8-9-3, which sums to zero in a game called oicho-kabu, where the yakuza get their name from (even in this cozy fantasy village, there's still back-alley violence!). Shogi pieces lurk across the town, using it as their own battlefield, to which the residents are blissfully unaware of. The go stones have been played in a reasonably-strategic way, if there was a giant tree and a sushi cart and some people on the board, but hey, Jon Bois once depicted a gridiron football game with a Bojangles and some apartments on the field, so this too is allowed. All the sakura cards from the two hanafuda decks are all centered around the tree in the back. There are a whole lot of other details that might catch your eye too!

This couldn't have been executed so perfectly without a few of my trusted friends: Willow, on lighting and weather illumination; Marisa, on stage work, reconstruction, and clumsiness recovery; and Brenna with her excellent story-telling work--every time I'd pose a figure, she'd somehow make them even more expressive. The work of them together as a crew has pushed this project to heights I could have never thought were possible. It took three hours to build the set, another seven to shoot it over two days, and I did the editing not far away on the laptop I write this artists' guide with.

It is my sincerest hope to that this work makes you feel wistful, longing for a cozy fantasy that can't really exist. Even myself, when I look at my own work, I feel my heart get a little bit warmer at the bustling town I worked quite hard on. And thanks to you, for coming to see the heartfelt work of my crew and I!

--Tanis

This was all shot on my dining table, with an elaborate set that took about three hours to build just right. I had help from a couple of good photographer friends, as well as a storyboarding consultant, and I think this turned out wonderfully. As night wore on, the weather shifted in the environment.

While this is still built in my living room (it will exist somewhere on this planet until late Sunday night!) I’m gonna shoot more, but here are some of my finished works about it.