Recent Work: Street Photography for Trip Advisor

Last year I had the opportunity to do some street photography around Tokyo as part of Trip Advisor’s global rebranding campaign. The brief involved capturing cities from the point of view of travelers, which meant capturing real scenes of real travelers - not staged! - all around Tokyo’s major tourist spots. Technically it was not a difficult shoot, because it was purely street photography, a genre which I am actually quite good at! The challenge lay in getting permission from my street photography subjects to be used in the campaign. Thankfully, I had the very good luck to have Catherine from the creative agency Hyperion with me, who was amazing at getting release forms signed by people who had (sometimes unwittingly) been photographed by me. We practically spent two days gallivanting around Tokyo, hitting the usual spots; Asakusa, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ueno and so on. We also joined a Trip Advisor-hosted bar crawl through Kabukicho, which was very, very fun. Having lived in Japan for 14 years at this point it is very nice to hang out with people seeing it with the wonder and enthusiasm that I remember first having when I moved over here.

Thanks to Trip Advisor and Hyperion LA for having me on this project, I am very much hoping that we can do an Osaka and Kyoto version soon!


From The Archive: Nakai Akira of RWB

Another post from my photography archive, in which I put up old photoshoots I’ve done around Tokyo and Japan. 

This time it features Akira Nakai of Rauh-Welt Begriff, or RWB, which is a legendary Porsche tuning studio based in Chiba, Japan. Seriously, this guy has some major clout in the custom car tuning world and his Porsche body kits have been copied and imitated the world over.  As is always the case however, you just can’t beat the original. Enjoy this blog post from the archives!

Akira Nakai of Rauh-Welt Begriff

One of the more pleasant surprises that I’ve had since my foray into professional photography is the frequency in which I get asked to photograph automotive related things. So far I’ve done commercial shoots for Mazda, Mitsubishi, and editorial ones at Nissan, Honda and Hyundai. This is interesting to me because it requires me to change up my thinking a great deal. Editorial portraiture has always been my strength and my passion so my first instinct on a photoshoot is to size up the location for the best ways to frame a person in the coolest/most interesting way possible. The thing about car magazines however – is that the focus isn’t on the person. Car magazine readers want to see cars, or car parts, or car bits and even on a shoot where the focus is to profile a custom car designer, a solid portrait of the subject concerned is a good bonus but really it’s still all about that sweet sweet car pr0n. So, composition, lighting and all that stuff really need to be reconsidered in order to make things work well in the article.


So – how to light and shoot a car on a quick, no budget editorial shoot? Best advice – bring a tripod. Tripods give you the option to lock down the camera and shoot different exposures of the same frame which you can then blend together in photoshop – a life saver if you have no idea how to light your car. If you absolutely must light up your car and have only speedlights then direct flash works surprisingly well, such as in the photos below.  But if you’re not equipped for a big shoot then you’re going to want to let the available light do the lifting. Luckily such as in the particular shoot below, the garage was an awesome mancave filled with excellent lighting and random paraphernalia that made location shooting easy.

Once again, I only shoot cars very occasionally and I’m much more comfortable with a live person in front of the lens. That said switching itup for a change is a fun way to get my brain thinking in different directions, which is something all creatives shouldn’t underestimate.

More to come soon!


Japan Crafts: Ryukobo Kumihimo

One of the things about photographing traditional crafts in Tokyo is a sense of disconnect each workshop has with its surroundings, both in a historical and physical sense. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, merely an unavoidable product of Tokyo having been the focus of all of Japan’s economic and political power for so many years, starting with its establishment as the seat of the Shogunate back in the 1600s.  The sankin-kotai system implemented by the Shogun would see fief lords and their vassals traveling in from all over Japan to pay obeisance, dragging with them the massive caravans of their families,  administrators, samurai, and very often, their favorite artisans. Thus Edo (the medieval name for Tokyo) became a melting pot of skilled artisans from all reaches of Japan. Cue the Meiji Revolution and Edo moves from de facto capital to official one, complete with a name change to one we all know: Tokyo. New winds were blowing - trade with foreign powers was cranking into high gear after centuries of isolationism. Artisans around the country with an yen to well, make yen, were moving their workshops into the new seat of the Emperor. 

All of this is to say that Tokyo’s identity as a crafts capital is largely based on the near constant migration of high quality crafts. I’d be hard pressed to name a homegrown Tokyo handicraft that didn’t borrow heavily from the many regional influences present at the time. 

Case in point is Ryukobo, a kumihimo workshop that’s been around since the late 1800s. Kumihimo, or braided cords, are an irreplaceable staple in many parts of Japanese life through the ages. It’s been around since the Asuka period, emerging in Nara, finding usage in samurai regalia, religious items, and later on as part of the Edo kimono. Nowadays kumihimo is branching out, finding new ways to thrive, and Ryukobo is at the very front of the pack.

Pictured above are the father and son duo Fukuda Ryu and Ryuta respectively. Father Ryu spent a year learning dyeing from a local master before returning to integrate that knowledge into running his family’s kumihimo workshop, offering bespoke design and dyeing for their cords.

Son Ryuta graduated from university before joining his father in the family business, bringing much needed business and design acumen in developing new products that utilized their traditional techniques. This dynamic partnership has proven a force to be reckoned with - amongst many honors they’ve collaborated on shoes worn by Lady Gaga, and were tapped to make the medal sashes for the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. That’s Ryuta pictured below, photographed as one of the finalists in the Japan Crafts 21 contest. 

Normally when I photograph artisans I tend to have them focused, contemplative, immersed in their world. Ryuta however, had a different idea for his photo, beaming me a brilliant, face-splitting smile. “I prefer to be photographed like this,” he told me. “I like looking happy.” 

As a photographer, I can’t argue with something like that. You’ve got to go along with the subject when they’re bringing energy to a shoot, and in this case, he stands apart from all of the other artisan portraits I’ve made - a young professional brimming with positive energy, just the thing a traditional craft like kumihimo needs.

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