My Persimmon - Iron Photographer 196 - Utata

Amarand Agasi

Three thousand
Haiku to examine
Two persimmons
- Masaoka Shiki

1 - something black (ink)
2 - something white (paper)
3 - shot in color

I worked really hard to design this shot from the very beginning. It was challenging to build dynamic tension by adjusting the angle of each element so that it had varying distances between other adjacent elements.

A close friend of mine inked the classic haiku on fancy paper with that very brush. My figurative persimmons are the eventual framing this lovely, handcrafted piece of art and this tasty piece of vegan sushi. Yum!

I think this poem reminds us that, although we all have to work, sometimes a lot, it's a good idea to keep in mind the little rewards at the end of a job well done.

A quick note about the creation of the haiku art: we took a kanji font built into Adobe Creative Cloud, and typed the glyphs from the original poem into Photoshop. I selected "bottom/center/top" for each line of vertical text. This was then used as the reference for painting the glyphs. It ends up looking a lot like something the professional haiku studios do (and charge a couple hundred dollars for a custom painting of) for a fraction of the cost.

Fun fact: did you know that it's challenging to hold sushi with chopsticks, pull focus, and take a picture all at the same time, with only two hands?

(Translation of original poem by Timothy L. Jackowski, Takase Studios, LLC)

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