While it's always nice to go somewhere new and take photos, it's always worth keeping your eyes open in the area where you live. It admittedly helps when the area in question is Japan's third or fourth biggest city (depending on how we define "city"; Tokyo isn't technically a city but it usually gets lumped in with them when discussing Japan) with a population of over two million. 

This weekend just past had quite a bit going on and I was never going to get around to shooting all of it, so I had to be selective. First up was the Thai festival. Now, in Japan, when you hear "(name of country) festival", it usually just means a whole load of food stalls slung together and a stage at the front for demonstrations of the country's culture. This Thai festival was...well, precisely that.

There were some pretty interesting characters around

In terms of colour, this place was the opposite of the grey-dominant scenes you see around offices and suchlike

In many ways this was your typical festival. However, there was a pretty impressive demonstration of Thai Boxing as well. I've always been interested in the martial arts, but I haven't seen much Thai Boxing up close. As such, I'm no expert on it, but I'm given to understand that a fight begins with a ritual set of movements which symbolise various things, as well as showing respect and demonstrating the fighter's skill. Sort of like a far more poetic version of a boxing staredown.

After this display of respect and prowess, they get down to kicking one another...

knocking one another down...

Throwing one another...

Hitting one another with flying knee strikes...

And climbing up on top of one another to use the elbow.

These fighters were young, but they demonstrated a lot of heart and what appeared to my untrained eyes to be considerable technical ability. This was a demonstration (and an impressive one, too). Then they brought out a couple of more senior fighters for a quick, but real, fight.

Mainly thanks to the above knockdown, blue took the decision

Following the festival, I made my way back in the general direction of home, but I couldn't resist bringing the camera out again when I came across a fire-eater performing. It was very dark, so I had to use the top ISO on the camera and shoot wide open at 1.7. The images were pretty noisy, but a few of them came out nicely enough to be presentable. I've found that noisy, high-ISO images tend to respond very well to B/W processing with Silver Efex, so I've put the colour and B/W versions up. Not sure which I prefer yet; the original RAW file had lots of purple fringing around the flames, which didn't look great, but put it in B/W and problem solved. Anyway, the pictures.

So while it's always good to go somewhere new and find new things to shoot, always keep an eye on your local area. Everything here was shot within a one or two mile radius.

Thank you for reading and looking, please feel free to leave comments.