Woot!  My newest post went up on Strobist.com overnight.  I interview Nara-based commercial photographer Shimada Yohei about his project called ‘Workmen’, and get some pretty good information on why shooting local projects is so important.

Check it out here!

Another post in my series about motivated lighting in cool locations – this time I went out to the surfer’s locale Shonan to photograph a story about the NOA, which is a cool invention that could possibly save your life in the case of a deadly tsunami. It’s basically a fiberglass, watertight shelter that sits in your home, which serves as a backup refuge in case you don’t have time to reach high ground. They’re made to float and are painted yellow to be highly visible even amidst piles of debris, so you can be quickly recovered by rescue teams in the aftermath of a disaster.  3/11/11 was a brutal reminder to the Japanese that the forces of nature that created their homeland are also just as capable of destruction, so there’s a lot of renewed interest in inventions like these. In the case of the NOA, it may help save the lives of the elderly or people who otherwise might not have time to reach the high ground in the case of a tsunami.

The factory where they get constructed is possibly one of the neatest locations I’ve photographed at – it was completely unique, authentic and had plenty of great light coming in through windows.  The kind of place that I want to hire out for a shoot for the whole day. Ichikawa-san however didn’t have all day, so I settled for a flexible two light setup for the shot below. For the main light I used a Westcott double fold shoot-thru umbrella to mimic the light coming through the factory door on camera left, and for the rim light I used an SB-900 in a Honl snoot to simulate the light coming through the narrow window at camera right.  The trick with motivated lighting is not to copy exactly what you see, but to light the scene in a way that it makes sense. Your brain sees the light and can connect it to the other sources in the room.

Anyway, here’s the same setup, but with Ichikawa-san moved to the left of the frame, in case it’s easier for the designers somehow.

For the shot below I gelled an SB-800 orange and clamped it inside the foreground NOA to mimic the worklight you can see in the rightmost NOA.

Keeping the SB-800 clamped inside I made Ichikawa-san climb inside for a shot.  I lit him using a snooted, orange-gelled SB-900, which was necessary to keep light from hitting the whole NOA, and also to avoid unwanted reflections.

Here’s the same setup from the side (and probably my favorite shot from the series):

Hope you enjoyed that post, will put more up soon!

Location photography is, well, awesome. There isn’t anything quite so fun. Sure, studios are great to hang out in, but are nowhere near as cool as a juicy location with tons of visual interest that you just can’t imitate on set…like an iron mill.  Here’s the first of several cool location shoots that I’ve done recently (and here’s a previous post in which I photograph an F1 driver in a live pit)

Swedish company Hoganas (add umlauts as you please) was kind enough to ask me to shoot some portraits of their Saitama staff for their annual report, which involved me traveling to an iron mill out in the country side. This is one of those locations that you always wish you could get into as a photographer – atmospheric, authentic, lots of neat things to photograph that you’d never see in ordinary locations.

Also – with all of the different and weird light sources everywhere (factories are not optimized for color temperature consistency, unsurprisingly), it’s a great place to practice motivated lighting. For the newb, motivated lighting = lighting your subjects in a way that makes sense, ie: corresponds more or less to the fixed lighting in the location, so it doesn’t look weird or inconsistent. The first shot below, was easy, as most the ambient light was straight from daylight coming in through the factory doors. All I did was use a Nikon SB-900 in a Westcott softbox to open up the shadows a little bit.

For this next shot I wanted to mimic the light coming from the flourescent bank of lights in the background, as if it were illuminating my subject from overhead. In this way, your eyes see the flourescent tubes in the background and tricks your brain into reasoning that either there’s another similar bank of light overhead in the frame, or that the lights in the back are somehow lighting our subject (which is impossible).  In order to achieve this odd mix between hard and soft light, I used my two go-to modifiers for simulating natural light (see here for another example); the Orbis ring flash and Westcott double fold shoot-thru umbrella. In this shot the Orbis is canted at a 45 degree angle a foot or so above my shooting position, and the umbrella is camera left, probably about a stop under the Orbis. Neither of the flashes are gelled green – why? I like the greenish color cast that pure flourescent lights throw over the environment and wanted to preserve that (if you can’t understand that then you need to read about color correction). Lastly in the back of frame there is an SB unit gelled full CTO (Color Temperature Orange for the newbs) adding an accent light and giving some depth to the shot.

For the shot below I used the Orbis ringflash at 45 degrees camera left, to mimic the flourescent tubes at the top left of the frame. In order to give the photo a little kick, plus throw rim light on the shadow side of the subject’s face I placed a full CTO SB unit in back of frame, facing back towards the camera. It could be taken for a halogen light (although you can still see the Manfrotto super arm that I used to attach it), but this kind of light doesn’t look out of place in a location such as this.

Anyway that’s it for my post on location shooting this time around, hope you enjoyed it and there will be more to come soon!

For the previous one, click here.

It’s always nice to have talented friends. The other day I did a shoot with Kaori, a friend of mine with many years of ballet under her belt – in which I thought I’d try something a little different and try combine light painting and ballet poses.

Just to run you through the whole process, the thing I used for the light streaks is something I cobbled together from bits and pieces – there’s a photo of it down below:

As you can see, it’s basically a jar filled with glass marbles, in which I’ve stuck a florescent light bulb.  I debated over the idea of taping colored gels onto the outside but in the end decided that the pure white streak was the look I was going for.

The lighting setup for Kaori is a Paul C Buff Einstein (thanks David!) in a large silver umbrella boomed over her head, and two Profoto D1s with 4′ gridded stripboxes behind and to either side. We shot the poses first and then used Capture One’s overlay feature to paint the streaks of light to best fit the pose.  Hope you enjoy them! (And btw boys, yes, she’s single )

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