Ever heard of Tatsuya Tanaka? He is a miniature photographer from Kumamoto, Japan. His claim to fame is his ‘miniature calendar’ that has become popular on the internet, magazines, and television.
The ‘miniature calendar’ is a collection of pocket-sized scenes of everyday life in familiar settings that depict every day of the 365 days of the calendar year.
It has more than one thousand scenes. Tanaka updates these on the homepage of his website and SNS everyday like a daily calendar.
According to Tanaka, this idea came from a comment on Instagram from someone who desired to see a miniature calendar every day. He started with photographing his collection of diorama dolls, reduced to scale.
His creativity so enamored the public that he set about fleshing out the theme ‘Likening one thing to another’, thereby discovering his current style.
It certainly requires a great amount of creativity to conceive the ideas for all 365 days. Tanaka stores his ideas most methodically by using ‘omnifocus’ app of the iPhone.
He stores them under categories like ‘practical now’, ‘hints for ideas’, etc. This exercise provides him with the material for his future creations.
Of course, the most challenging part for Tanaka is posting every single day. It is certainly remarkable that he has been continuing this since April 20, 2011, without a break.
For him, creating ideas has become an ongoing process. And he gets them from such commonplace material, such as toilet paper rolls, ice cream sticks and the like.
Of all his ideas, his favorite ones are the broccoli work ‘picnic’ that adorns his photo book cover and ‘way home’ that likens tatami mats to rice fields.
His future plans are to make an original miniature diorama doll by changing the color of the readymade ones and rearranging them. So, keep your eyes peeled on his website to view his new ideas that are tipped to be as great and poised to take the creative world by storm.
Tatsuya Tanaka
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