Late late last year I had the wonderful opportunity to do a photoshoot for BBC’s Top Gear magazine, on a kind of documentary story about one life in the night of a Tokyo taxi driver.  In addition to shooting the story, I also had to do the fixing – eg; find a taxi company who would let us ride around with one of their drivers all night, so I had my work cut out for me.  Fixing is something I regularly do when shooting for magazines outside Japan, and is one of the advantages of being a bilingual photographer here, as I usually get a bonus.

Anyway, you can see and read the great article in January’s Top Gear magazine (should be available worldwide), but here are some photos of Sudou-san, our driver for the night, whom I actually met on the way to a shoot. He was one of the coolest taxi drivers I’d ever met so I decided to ask him if he was interested in doing the story and he said yes.  The funniest thing is that the shoot that he was driving to was actually scheduled for the next day – I’d gotten the dates wrong but in exchange I met the driver for the article and made a great friend. Everything happens for a reason

For a full description of the project, BTS and previous shots go here.

For those wondering, shot with 35mm Kodak Ektachrome.

Vignette #3

My book for 2012 has arrived! Check it out – I made a short and simple timelapse going through each page.  Actually I messed up a bit and actually missed turning some pages, so if you want to see the whole thing, you’ll have to catch up with me in person!

Thanks to the people at Memo Production for the fine quality book. I shot these photos with my D700 on interval, using a Profoto D1 to light it (see how consistent the light is in each shot? This is where speedlights fall flat)

Anyway, hope you enjoy it!

I can’t remember whether I posted these before, but I found these photos kind of hibernating on my hard drive, and thought I might put them up for the world to see.

A year or so ago I did a shoot with friend and model Yamaguchi Akiko based on the theme of the Japanese art of Noh. Noh is a very restrained form of theater; it’s extremely strict and very centered on tradition, with next to no room for introducing modern theater elements. Watching it, one would be forgiven for thinking that nothing much was happening – it does indeed appear to move at glacial speed.  An entire play can pass with you being mystified as to what happened, so it’s definitely seen as a kind of entertainment primarily enjoyed by the elderly population.

Anyway, one major element of Noh theater is the masks that the main actors use to portray the character they’re playing. The crafting of these masks is an art and each one is skillfully designed to change expression with each subtle tilt of the head. As such, they make great subjects for lighting. The two masks that Akiko is holding below actually represent the duality of the female character – in actuality they are supposed to depict the same female lead. The mask Akiko is holding close to her face is meant to show the normal, beautiful side of the female character, whereas the evil, demonic mask she’s letting dangle by her side shows the same female character when she’s in a rage. I’m sure a lot of guys out there can see how accurate these two depictions of the same woman are  Apparently the idea is that each these two sides are an intrinsic part of each woman, which is great because the masks are such a good visual aid for representing duality. Here are some of the shots below, and some lighting information:

For most shots I just used an SB-900 in a large shoot-thru umbrella, but for times when I needed a little light to give detail to the luxuriant obi, or sash such as the one Akiko is wearing in the photos above and below, I used another speedlight with a Honl bounce card dialed in just enough to bring out the detail and nothing more.

In the two shots below the mask Akiko is using belongs to the cheeky old man character, so it doesn’t really below to the female duality series. We managed to have some fun with them though. It really is amazing how different lighting brings out different expressions from each mask! I definitely count myself fortunate to have had access to these masks.

My newest blog post on Strobist.com is up! This time I talk to Japanese editorial photographer Ono Shouichi about his amazing project to photograph 200 Japanese centenarians.  Read about it here.

Also – he as iPad apps for the project, one of them is free, and the other one is only 99c!  Go grab them here and here.

Image copyright Ono Shouichi, 2012

This is Captain Toyohiko Tomioka, the captain of the Tokyo Fire Department’s Hyper Rescue Squad, which is the most elite emergency response squad in the country. Considering these guys have to be in a state of constant readiness due to the fact that a devastating earthquake could strike Tokyo at anytime, Tomioka’s men are certainly the best of the best. Their headquarters are in Tokyo but they are on call to respond to any crisis that requires their expertise around the entire nation.

March 11, 2011 – Japan gets hit by the triple body blow of a magnitude 9+ earthquake, devastating tsunami and a nuclear disaster. If ever there was a need for these guys it was right then. Tomioka and his squad are the first on the scene at the stricken Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant, which had reported problems with shutting down and was now experiencing overheating. Everyone knew the situation was bad, but at that time no one knew exactly how bad. Tomioka’s team undertook the dangerous job of pouring seawater into the unstable reactor to bring the temperature under control.

When finally the facts came out it turned out that several of the reactors had indeed suffered a meltdown on March 11, and it was only through the rapid and tireless intervention of Tomioka’s squad that prevented the situation from spiraling further out of hand.  Without his efforts, at the very worst a large scale explosion could have occurred, at the very least much larger populations would have had to be evacuated as the condition of the reactors worsened. These guys are heroes in every sense of the word.

Which is why they received the Fundacion Principe Asturias Award recently – which is the highest honor one can receive from the Spanish Royal family. The award was given collectively to the ‘Fukushima 50′, meaning the fifty brave men and women in Tomioka’s squad, but he himself was chosen as the representative to receive the award. Here he is photographed for Spanish magazine XL Semenal at his Headquarters in Tokyo.

Those hoses you see in the background of the shot above are the ones used to cool the reactors in Fukushima. Capable of putting through several tons of water a minute. Pretty crazy stuff, right?

Here’s another new side project that I’ll be doing throughout the year from now on.  Many of you probably know that I now have a fiance, a real one this time, and seeing as I’ve decided to spend the rest of my life with this person, heck, I may as well turn it into another project.

‘Vignettes of a life with you’ is basically an excuse for me to mess around with different ways of presenting the shots I take of my fiance.I originally shot the photos with my Bessa R4a rangefinder, 40mm f/1.4 and Kodak ISO 100 Ektachrome, and was trying a whole bunch of things the other day to try figure out a good way to digitize/scan the images without actually buying a good scanner. So, I made a film ‘holder’ out of two bits of black cardboard that I glued together and used that to hold the film while I shot each frame with a D700, zoomed in 24-70 and an SB900 + umbrella in the back to act as a ‘lightbox’. So, technically, even though I shot used natural light for the actual shots, I still photographed each frame with flash  Habits are hard to break I guess.

Anyway,  considering that I couldn’t get any closer (don’t have a macro lens), the shots basically ended up with black borders like you see below. The rest was cropping it to a square and cleaning up the rough edges in photoshop. Here’s a shot of the setup, taken on my iPhone. As you can see it’s not a very sophisticated setup; just an umbrella and a DIY bit of cardboard clamped in place.

So, these will be popping up one at a time for the duration of this year (and maybe more), so I hope you enjoy them! Also, let me know what you think of the process. I’m sure there are better and more intelligent ways to do what I’m doing.

Vignette No. #1

Vignette No. #2

Hey guys, just wanted to share a small side project that I did over the new year’s break with you. Kind of wanted to do something that involved new years some how so I went out on the cold winter streets with a clipboard, a brush and some paper and asked people to write a single kanji that signified their hopes and dreams for the year of the dragon. Lots of people refused, but some were quite obliging, and I have to hand it to Ikuo and Kiko, who after writing their own kanji helped me flag down other people.

If you live in Japan you’ll be well familiar with kanji but for those who have no idea, kanji is the pictograph-style writing system that is used in Japan and wider parts of Asia. The great thing about kanji is that while each single character can have several different meanings, the overall ‘feel’ of the character can be understood very easily. Thus, a writing a single character doesn’t simply mean one thing – the viewer has a very good idea of what the writer is trying to communicate, but also has the leeway to interpret the intended message for themselves.  If it sounds difficult to grasp don’t worry; it is difficult, but it’s also part of the beauty of the system too.

Ikue-san wrote 実 – minoru – which means to bloom/come into fruition/actuality. “A bit cliche, actually,” she admits. This could be taken to mean that she hopes that her goals and others’ will be realized this year.

Keiko-san wrote 続 – tsuzuku, zoku – which means to continue/series/stream. This may signify her desire to keep doing something from last year, or to stick with a project that she’s started recently.

Joanne wrote 写 – utsusu, sha - which means to project/describe/copy. She may want to project herself into what she does a bit better, or maybe she wants to spend more time in reflection, or perhaps she just wants to take more photos, given that the kanji is also part of 写真 – shashin – which means wait for it: photo.

Emi-san wrote 海 – umi – which simply means ocean. “I love the ocean,” she explains. She must want to go to Hawaii this year or something.

Asuka, my fiance, wrote 道 – michi, dou - which means road/the way/journey/moral teachings.  It can mean that she wants to find her way this year, or perhaps that she wants to stick to a course, or figure out what to do.

“I’ll write an easy one,” Yoshio-san says as he writes 力 – chikara, riki – which means strength, power, ability.  You can read into this many ways of course, as strength comes in many forms. Maybe he wants to be better at what he does, or needs to be strong enough to see something through this year.

Chiba-san, who was walking about with Yoshio-san, wrote 人 – hito – which means people/person. Perhaps he wants to be better with people, or maybe wants to meet more people this year.

Matsu-san wrote 結 – musubu, ketsu – which means to tie/bind/join together or fasten.  Maybe he wants to get married this year, or maybe he wants to bring something together – once again it’s easy to read several different meanings into this.

Shinpei-san wrote 先 – saki – which has the dual meaning to be in front/to be first/to precede/to follow.  Yes it’s very confusing but it works somehow.  Shinpei-san doesn’t elaborate on this but I’m sure he knows what he needs to be in front of.

Mana-chan wrote 笑 – warau – which means to laugh or smile. Given that she has such a lovely smile I hope that her year is full of them.

Shinpei-san (another one) wrote 極 – kiwameru, kyoku – which means extreme/to bring to an end/to persist /to succeed. This kanji has a ton of meanings, but my favorite one has to be to overcome your obstacles.

Kouhei wrote 貯 – tamaru - which means to save/to hoard/to pile up/to keep.  As he writes it he says “This one’s going to be realistic.” He’s probably thinking about money – perhaps I should make it my kanji for this year too

And lastly, Kiko wrote 叶 – kanau - which means grant, answer. “May our wishes for this year be granted,” she tells me.  May they be granted indeed!

The camera and lens I used was a D700 with a 50 f/1.2 AiS, for the gear heads out there. All shot [gasp] without flash!

One more quick post – last year I had the opportunity to photograph the UK rock band Arctic Monkeys, who were part of the Fuji Rock lineup that season. They’re pretty famous for getting their big break on Myspace – now they obviously tour the world so it was great to have the opportunity to meet and shoot them for AERA.  The press management team gave me the usual ten minutes for the photo but I managed a three-light setup. There was a D1 + 60-inch shoot-thru umbrella behind me for fill-light, another Profoto D1 in a 24-inch softbox slightly camera right, plus an SB-900 and Honl grid right in front of the softbox to give the shadows a bit of an edge. This is something that I’ve been trying out a lot recently – putting a hard restricted light source right in front of a large, soft light source can really give you a lot of control over the quality of the shadows your light creates. Another instance where I’ve tried this technique was when I photographed my family here.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and I’ll have some more up soon!

Just a quick post today, but just wanted to talk about the random cool things that sometimes happen as a photographer – one of them is shooting a professional opera singer in a park while he’s singing. I think the whole park must have heard him – they have to be super loud to make sure their voices fill the entire concert hall – I can only imagine what other people must have been thinking as this beautiful, pure singing started ringing out throughout the grounds. Really neat, and a good reminder of why I got into this in the first place – which is to meet and photograph interesting people who are really good at what they do.

Lighting setup: When you have late afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees like this you really don’t need to much – lighting was an SB-900 in a Westcott 24″ softbox , camera right. I let the ambient light do most of the hard work. Lens was the Nikkor 135mm f/2 DC, for anyone wondering.