Two weeks ago Sue and I traveled to Nagasaki as our friend Paule Saviano from New York was having an exhibition in the Nagasaki Peace Museum entitled “From Above.” This exhibition is about the people who survived the war, it features survivors from Nagasaki and also the Tokyo fire bombings and he has recently added to it by photographing survivors from Hiroshima and Dresden. The exhibition continues to grow and next year he will be showing in Dresden, Chemitz, Tokyo and Nagasaki. Photographing the survivors is a massive project for Paule, he has been writing to people to try to get access to survivors, he’s been flying round the world, organizing shows with the help of Izumi, the curator of the gallery ef in Tokyo where Paule has shown several shows of the years. It’s an absolutely amazing project, he first sits and listens to the stories each survivor has to tell, sometimes for several hours, then he takes their portraits. As you can imagine, the survivors are all now very old, they won’t be around much longer and Paule’s project is all about remembering peoples stories of the day. Many of the survivors had kept the events history to themselves, some of them hadn’t even told their families what had happened, but Paule’s efforts are making sure that the memories of these people live on and I have nothing but the utmost admiration for all his efforts and what he is doing.

Unlike Hiroshima with its “genbaku domu” (bomb dome), Nagasaki doesn’t really have relic from the day the bomb was dropped to act as a symbol of the day. There are many statues around town near the epicenter, a column stands erect where the epicenter was and circles of bricks fan out from it to depict the bomb blast fanning out, but it takes on a somewhat off atmosphere when you stand back a bit and see a love hotel called Seagull in the background. Next to the epicenter is the column of original Urakami Cathedral which was mostly destroyed by the blast, but it had been moved several hundred meters from it’s original site and lacked impact for me. Apparently the remains of the Urakami Cathedral were a stark symbol of the bomb, but seeing as how it was a Cathedral (the largest in Asia actually), a symbol of Christianity and western ideals, there was pressure on the Japanese from the American government to pull down the remains as they didn’t want the symbol of the Nagasaki bomb to be a reminder that the bomb killed Christians. Nearby the epicenter in the Nagasaki peace park is perhaps the biggest statue to remember the bomb, again a symbol of peace, but it’s a colossus with a distinctly Asian face and the body of a Greek God. It’s supposed to represent humanity, one hand pointing to the sky to symbolise the bomb, one hand held flat to indicate peace.

All the statues in Nagasaki symbolize peace, you get the feeling there that everyone is trying to move forward positively through promoting peace. The only physical lasting remnants are in the atomic bomb museum, you walk through it seeing the twisted metal, melted glass, the clocks that stopped at 11.02 and even human shadows burned onto walls. It has a big impact, it’s a fairly small museum, but when you take your time to read the info at the exhibits you can easily spend a few hours there. The personal memories of the events of the atomic bomb are being lost every year, I’m not sure how many survivors remain, perhaps only a few hundred and that’s what makes Paule’s show so important. His show at the Nagasaki Peace museum was great, it didn’t sensationalize anything, it just told peoples stories.

Whilst in Nagasaki Paule was really busy, not just with the setting up of the show, but also photographing more survivors and dealing with an insane amount of media attention. I think on the day we arrived he had something like 9 TV interviews, 7 newspaper interviews and a radio interview. One day when he was meeting a survivor, Fukuhare san, he was kind enough to invite Sue and along to meet him. We sat in a room in the Atomic bomb survivors museum and listened to Fukuhare san tell the story of the day, how he lost a lot of his family, how he spent 36 hours covering the city trying to find family members and how himself photographed a lot of the aftermath to make him feel like he was doing something to make sure the events were never forgotten. Fukuhare san was very upbeat about the whole situation, he described hell whilst smiling and joking which made it a bit odd to listen to in some ways. I know many of the survivors Paule has talked to before become (understandably) very emotional when telling their stories, so I guess we had an easy one to listen to in some ways.

Paule listens to the stories and takes a picture, it’s such a simple thing but such an important thing. He’s doing it mostly all out of his own pocket, he puts an immense amount of time into arrnaging to meet these people and then he keeps in touch with them afterwards. He tries to keep out of the limelight as much as he can, I know all the media attention got to him a bit although a few of the reporters (notably the Asahi shibum team) were very nice. It’s just about telling the stories for Paule, it’s an amazing project and I really suggest you go check out all the details about this project and all the other amazing wok he does at his blog.

Anyway, on with some work stuff. A couple of months back I did a job for Tokyofashion.com reviewing the Grimoire fashion store in Shibuya , well last month Grimoire were having their anniversary party in Shibuya and a lot of their customers were there, so once again I went along to photograph the event for Tokyofashion.com. The full article and all the photos are here but I thought I would put some of them here and add a couple as well.

For a shoot like this, the main thing is to get a good bunch of shots of the people all dressed up ready to party. It was a dolly kei party, it’s not quite your everyday fashion and a lot of the people there were really quite shy, so the sight of a big tall bald Scotsman running around with a camera could be off putting, so before I got on with work, I spent a bit of time walking around, saying hi to people and explaining why I was there. Also, my wife Sue was there helping me out with some lighting, asking some people questions and even doing some shooting with my back up for me so we could cover more ground. You never know how dark these venues can be, how crowded they will be, if it will be appropriate to get in amongst people having fun to ask if we could get their picture, so in our usual style, Sue and I turned up an hour early, caught the early crowds queuing to get in and started work early. The people there were maybe quite shy to begin with, but once we had spoke to a few and they opened up to us, almost everyone else came out of their shell a bit were really nice to and accommodating. Sometimes in other parties I have shot I get plagued with drunken guy and gals jumping in front of me telling me to take their photo and then not leaving me alone and being a pain in the butt, but everyone there was really nice. It was cool to see them arrive alone, or in a small group, then soon making friends with other attendees.

In the end, despite it being quite a long shoot in a fairly crowded space, it was a really fun chilled job. The lighting wasn’t too bad, we needed flashes for every shot and we had to shoot either straight up, slightly behind us or forward at a 45 degree angle to get the light right, but at the end of the night we had more than enough good material, so all round a good shoot.

Some pre-party shots

Some party shots

And some of Sue and I at work, hidden well behind the cameras and feeling like fashion outsiders.

Anyway, earlier on this year I was chief photographer for Whisky Live 2010 in Tokyo Big site in Odaiba one Sunday afternoon in late February. It was a very long day, starting at 9.30am and finishing at 7.30pm with no time for a break, only a mouthful of water here and there and a bite of sandwich whilst downloading photos from my memory card to my Macbook to sustain me, so a long tough day. There was a lot to cover, first of the whisky booths being set up by the various makers from Scotland and Japan (about 50 booths in total) in the main hall at big site, 18 tasting sessions (each one hour long, 6 happening at the same time in different rooms in Big site), covering the crowds, different whisky cocktail making sessions, live music performances, prize giving sessions, the World Whisky Awards, interviews and a whole host of other stuff. When all the different events of the day which were happening in different areas were added up, it actually came to more than 30 hours of events that were going on. Obviously, that would be impossible for me alone to cover, so I had to hire another Tokyo based photographer, Stephen Lebovits, to come along and help me out for the day. Initially I only wanted him to come in to help me out with the booths and the tasting sessions, but he was kind enough to come along for the whole day and help out. Even with two people, it was a lot of work and impossible to cover everything, so we had to divide everything into blocks of time. For example, from around 11am-midday was the first 6 tasting sessions whilst there was also music performances going on in the main hall, so what I would do is divide the tasting sessions between Stephen and I, so we had three each to cover and limit ourselves to 10 minutes in each and then get down to the main hall so one of us could cover the music, the other the crowd enjoying themselves. There was a gap of one hour between each block of tasting sessions when more events were to be covered, some required us both to be at the stage, some required one of us to go do a portrait session with V.I.Ps from the whisky world, then we both had to be in the main hall for the big events. Logistically it looked hard (and it was), but when we kept our timings tight it was manageable. For all events, timing is the key, you don’t have time to hang about waiting for special shots, you just have to stick to a strict schedule and do the best you can in a short space of time. You need to have flashes working most of the time, you need two bodies and a variety of lenses and back up batteries on you at all time. You have to anticipate moments, get the good shots that define the event, what the organizers have put time and effort into arranging and want records of as well as the random stuff that emerges from the crowds.

I’ve been doing events for nearly three years now. I started off as second photographer for some big corporate events and in hindsight I spent too much time waiting for shots and although I did get some very nice artsy shots which looked really cool, I didn’t really get “enough” images to keep the boss happy. I have memories of being told something along the lines of “these photos are very good, but it would be nice if you had double the amount.” Overtime I learned to shoot on rapid, you see something and fire off 5-10 shots and choose the best, if however it’s still life such as a bottle, then you can choose your shot more carefully, the main thing is you have to do it quickly as there is always something else to be shot.

At the end of the day I had taken about 3000 photos. More than 60GB on my full to bursting macbook. The shoot was on a Sunday and my client had given me a deadline of Wednesday to have everything edited and sent, so I started working through the photos when I got home that night, chose the best 700 or so and edited them down over the next day and a half. There’s no time to do detailed edits, so it’s very basic trimming, adding light to the shadows, tweaking the colours, taking the harshness out of spotlights etc. As a rule though, if the photo doesn’t look good before editing, I don’t waste time making them look good and losing resolution in the process. If it looks good already, make it look a bit better, if it looks nasty don’t try to save it, the flaws will show through. I had done my work by Tuesday morning and then I just had to wait for Stephen to finish his edits and send them over to me. Then when I had everything from him in the afternoon I put them into folders (tasting sessions, awards, booths) to make it easy for the client to locate and send images to participants and sent them off Tuesday night before the deadline. Job done.

If you happen to be around in Tokyo next year during the event, i suggest you get down. I wouldn’t mind attending myself as a civilian, the selection of whisky there is amazing, you really can try the best and even get to sample some not yet released drams….it was painful to look and smell, but not taste. maybe I’ll have a little drink now to wind down though….

Ayway, here are a few photos from the day to give a flavour of what’s going on. The large chap on the stage was the first foreign sumo champ, Konishiki. Apparently they had Miss Universe Japan interested in being the special guest (she is a whisky fan), but she had a prior engagement. Maybe next time….

I’d been looking at various options for how to present my work, but finally I decided to go with a company called Foliolink. They have different packages available, they have a lot of different templates to choose from and have a choice of html and flash sites, they have options for selling you work via your own micro stock site (something I’ve not tapped into yet), make it easy to put in tags to get you a better search engine optimization (SEO) and best of all, it’s a very simple system that I can build and update whenever I want. Not a very cheap option, but worth every penny as it’s a good platform to present my images in a decent scale to get that “wow” factor from potential clients whom I will send the link to. I still have to work more on getting my Google search ratings up, but with time hopefully enough people will be finding me and bringing in more work that way.

Anyway, rather than talking anymore, here’s what it looks like:

http://willrobb.com

I still have a bit of work to do on it, but it’s getting there. Here are some images from the different portfolios as well:

After scouting some spots in the temple grounds for post ceremony portraits I had about 5 minutes to work out the lighting inside the temple, which wasn’t much time at all. It was pretty dark inside and the light outside was strong, a big contrast so I had to use my two speedlight flashes (580 EX and 580EX II) off shoe as slaves and fire them with my speedlight transmitter ST-E2 mounted on my bodies. I had my 24-70 lens on my 5D mk II and my 50mm lens on my 5D, swapping the speedlight transmitter onto each as I needed it. The couple were seated in the middle of the temple, the priest in front of them and their respective families to the side. I placed the flashes on the tatami mats in front of the couple and angled them very slightly towards the couple to make sure the were lit up correctly, but also keep the flashes close enough for me to grab and hold above my head and fire into the (thankfully) white painted ceiling to illuminate the familes as I shot them at different points throughout the ceremony, when sake was getting passed round for example. So, my flashes were getting worked hard to get the light right during the ceremony and when it was finished I was asked to get a group shot of everyone, this time I had to stick my flashes on tables at the side of the group, angle them up and towards the group slightly so the flashes would actually cross over each other a bit and cancel out shadows. I didn’t have much time to work on this, but managed to get a good lot of the shots spot on and I didn’t have to keep the guests more than a minute. During weddings, I try to keep the portraits sessions as quick as possible and allow people to get on with their wedding business, so a lot of the work isn’t just taking pictures, it’s problem solving with light in a very short time frame.

We had planned on at least 30 minutes of portrait time round the temple grounds after the ceremony, but due to delays in the ceremony kicking off there was only about 4 minutes to do portrait sessions and there were also many guests who wanted to snap the happy couple. So, I let the guests get their snaps for the first minute or so and then I had to do a quick session in the grounds as the couple came out, down the steps and off for their taxi to take them to the reception. I was happy with the results, but I would have liked a bit more time to shoot in some other areas and also break out my light reflector board, but time just wasn’t on my side and I had to make do with my flashes again.

A quick taxi ride later and we were all at the reception a venue, a beautiful house owned by a friend of the happy couple which had a nice roof area for some portraits with the family before the reception itself started. Here there was a bit more time to play with and I could use my reflector board. It was slightly overcast, but the board brought the light out well and the backdrop down to the sea was great. Two of the guests were actually good friends of mine, so I roped my friend Asami into being my assistant for 20 minutes and she did a good job. I showed her how to work the boards to reflect light where it was needed and get rid of some shadows on the people whilst still keeping the sky colour pretty vibrant in the background and she did an excellent job. I made dinner for her and her husband a few days later to say thanks, well worth it for her help. Anyone else wanting to help me out could get the same treat I think…as long as they have strong stomachs anyway.

After all the portraits were out of the way, I just mingled during the reception, making sure I covered the meal, speeches, people having fun, all the moments that come together to make the big day memorable. It was a pretty long day, shooting from about 1pm to 8.30pmish without a break (although I was always being brought water and snacks by the catering staff which I was very grateful for). All in all I took more than 2000 photos, all shot on RAW so I was going through my 16GB and 8GB cards fairly quickly, so I had to keep downloading images to my macbook every so often, usually during long speeches when I just needed the start and finish, I have about 5-6 cards on me at any point, so I never run out or have to rush off to download at “important” points of the reception. From the 2000 I chose the best 800 and edited down to the best of them and they got a few hundred photos in the end.

The couple were really really nice to me, after I finished work the sorted me out with some lovely food and then cracked open some very old and very large bottles of wine from the cellar and were kind enough to invite me to join them (modeled here by my friend Shigeo, who’s wife Asami had helped me out earlier). After a long day’s hard work I really enjoyed their hospitality and had a few nice glasses of wine before getting the bullet train back to Tokyo. I think maybe I should insist on a large bottle of old wine at the end of each wedding shoot now, perfect way to finish a shoot off.

A very enjoyable days work, a lovely couple and they were very happy with the results. A job well done.

The full story on Galaxxxy by Paul with a lot more of my photos can be found here on the Tokyofashion.com site, but just as a quick background, it’s a brilliant set of two little stores, one for boys and one for girls featuring some mad cap clothing full of vibrant colours and wild designs which are heavily influenced by manga, TV, art and music from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. They aren’t a vintage clothes store, they make all their own items of clothing and mix it in with a variety of eclectica ranging from old Nintendo consoles, my little ponies, Michael Jackson figures and porcelain leopards in store. It felt a bit like going back in time to my youth when I went in there actually, I was ready for the A-team to come on TV and have my mum call me through for dinner. Ah, them were the days.

As per normal for these things, I called up in advance so we could get access to the store before opening time, if customers are in the store we technically need to get permission from anyone who would be in the photo, sometimes verbal confirmation is enough, sometimes a signed agreement is the way to go, but when you go early and there are no customers it means you don’t have to bother with permissions, so unless the specific piece requires customers in it, we go for the store and staff only option.

As Paul and Sue interviewed one of the bosses, Jun Arai in the Galaxxxy HQ, I worked my way round the two stores, they were just small places, so only 15 minutes in each place before off to the HQ for some portraits as Arai san was being interviewed. After all was supposed to be done and dusted, Arai san mentioned that Galaxxxy was also doing an exhibition in a nearby gallery featuring some of the original artworks by their designers, so he was kind enough to bundle us all in a taxi and take us over to see it. Sometimes the owners of stores can’t wait to have press out and get customers in, so it’s nice when you meet someone like Arai san who is so passionate about his business he wants to show you as much as he can.

We actually had three jobs on that day, after that we did a fast fashion piece for the japan Times and then later on we covered the Yohji Yamamoto show for Tokyofashion.com again, but the Galaxxxy gig was the most enjoyable for me. Not only were the staff great, it was just such a great place to photograph, such a collection of odd and zany items in store with equally interesting staff on hand, as Paul said afterwards, it’s the kind of place you would only find in Japan.

The other day I was going through some archives for some travel stock from Japan and got sidetracked by some images from Thailand I took a few years ago. When I was in there I spent a day in the slums of Khloeng Toi with a charity group, The Duang Prateep foundation, who ran schools for children, organised waste disposal and even funded a fire brigade as the government wouldn’t provide any amenities for this deprived area. The people really were living in poverty, the charity schools there were operating at costs so low that each child there can get education for one year (including meals each day) for a mere $30. However, even with costs as low as this the parents in the area just didn’t have enough money to afford such a luxury, so donations from people (mostly people in Japan actually) were the main means for covering the costs of education. The kids in the school were really bright kids, they were learning English and were confident in asking me questions and they were loving what they were doing, just as all children should have the chance to do. However, once we were outside in the slums and I met kids there, they just seemed despondent, they didn’t speak much and seemed to have the weight of the world resting on their shoulders. Some of the charity workers I was with told me that the few kids they manage to educate usually do well in life, but those without the schooling end up living their lives in the slums, becoming gang members as the only means of making a living, usually selling drugs and guns. It really hammered home to me the importance of education and how it really does put so many opportunities our way.

Out and about in the slums there was real poverty everywhere, some entrances to houses were rammed with trash, most houses were built over stinking pools of sewage filled water, the stench in the summer heat was pretty over powering, but that’s just how life is there. People were going about their daily business, hanging clothes up to dry on spaces where buildings had collapsed, making use of whatever was available.

Despite living in such dire conditions, the people there were very friendly and open. With the help of an interpreter everyone we spoke to would answer questions openly about life there, they would open their doors to us, offer us food and drinks and we would sit and chat about their lives like I had known them all my life. I’ve often found on my travels the people who have the least amount of possessions are the ones with the biggest hearts. It was amazing to see how the people made do with what they had and didn’t complain, that’s the way life is for them, they just have to get on with it and do the best they can. I really enjoyed my time there, I was very fortunate to meet and photograph so many interesting people.

So, I was glad to take 30 minutes or so out of my schedule the other day, just to go through the archives of my images which are in many ways the archives of my life as well, documents of my memories that I dip into every now and again that serve to remind me that I am really lucky to have the life I have.

At the moment I am going through my photos of Korea to edit them up ready to send off to Lonely Planet. First off, I use Aperture to import images, either from my camera memory cards or my back up files. For my current edit, I am taking them from my portable HDD where I have already saved the best images from my trip. I just make a project file called “Seoul” in Aperture, click import, go to where my images are, select a file and all images in the file pop up in a window.

First off, before I import the images I write in the essential Metadata I need to fill in, the date the images were taken, the city in which they were taken, the state/province and the country. If all the images are from a similar place with a similar event (such as a festival) I also add some information into the comment sections, but here I can’t as the photos are from different places in Seoul.

Then I go to the pop up window with the images. All the images are automatically selected, seeing as how these are pretty good images anyway I deselect a few “iffy” shots if I see them so they won’t get imported and then click import to bring them all into the project I created and repeat the process with images in different folders (I always save travel events by days) until I’ve imported all I need.

Once I have imported all my shots, I usually have a fair bit. In this case, 609 images. I select the “split-view option” so I can see the individual images in detail and see the images before and after them in the browser below. At this point I am viewing the images rated “unrated or better” which means all the shots are on the screen.

As you can see, a lot of them are very similar. I won’t send all these shots, just the very best of them as the guys at Lonely Planet wouldn’t have much love for me if I sent dozens of images of the same thing that differed only very slightly. If, for example, I’m looking at photos of a temple guard, I will look at the best of them together, see which one is best in terms of lighting, colour focus etc and send just 3-4 images if I have some different angles, if not, just the strongest shot. To get the strongest shot I just look at each image along a similar theme and compare them, when I find the shots I like, I click on them to bring up my options and then give them a rating of “***” which has no meaning attached to it, it’s just an arbitrary way for me to separate the wheat from the chaff as it were.

Once I have went through all my shots and rated them, I then select to only show images with a rating of “***” and the amount of photos I have to work through are drastically reduced. For this edit, I plan to use about 200 shots from the 609 best, but for the example here I only selected about 10 images with a “***” rating.

First off, I go through all the images and edit them. For this, I crop or straighten them if I have to, then I have to view the image at actual size to see if there are any dust spots on the sensor. Despite the canon EOS 5D mk II having a sensor cleaner (or any other DSLR for that matter) you don’t always get a 100% clean image, so I scan the image to select and eliminate the pesky little specks with the retouch brush. You’ll see one in the 3rd shot down just slightly down to the right of the brush icon. All you do is select the size of brush you need to cover the speck, put the brush over the speck and then it works it out as you will see in the 4th shot down. Brilliant.

After I’ve done that, I click on the adjustments toolbar to give me my editing options and then I will check if I need to adjust white balance, exposure,recovery, brightness or anything in the colours section. For Lonely Planet, I can’t adjust noise reduction, sharpness, highlights, shadows, contrast, definition or the likes. If I adjust any the initial variables I mentioned I can only change them slightly as well, so there isn’t much scope for making a bad pic look good, if it’s not good in the first place, I can’t use it so I won’t waste my time.

For the sake of making the example easy, I selected the blue colour in the background of the photo with the dropper tool in the colour section which automatically puts the exact same colour into my adjustment options and then I increased saturation and reduced luminance to show you what Aperture can do. As well as doing this for the image as a whole, Aperture 3 lets you adjust specific areas on your image with the new upgraded brushes section which is brilliant when there is only a little bit of the image needing changed.

Once I’ve been through all the images and edited them, I then go back through them all one by one whilst checking the metadata is OK and add in my captions.

After all this is done, I go through all my images again to make sure they are all up to standard, do one final check over all my captions as I inevitably make some spelling mistakes and once I am satisfied, I export all my images as 8-bit Tiff files to my portable HDD. Then finally burn them to disk and send them off by mail to Lonely Planet. I always get good feedback on my edits and my captions, so I guess I must be doing it half right. To be honest, I am not the most technical guy in the world, I know what I have to do to get the images I need up to standard, but if you asked me to use photo shop to adjust layers and the likes I wouldn’t be much good…until I maybe had a while to study it anyway.

According to legend, Sensoji temple was founded in 628 by two brothers who found a golden statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy on March 18th whilst fishing in the nearby Sumida river. Despite returning the statue to the river, three times it returned to the brothers and it it’s honour they built a temple nearby the river bank close to where they found the statue in which the image was to be kept safe. Once the temple was built, it is said that 1000 pine trees spring up around the temple over night and a Golden Dragon about 30 m in length was seen dancing in the sky and then it descended into the new pine forest and disappeared. The temple is now called Sensoji, but it’s official and original name is Kinryuzan, which means mountain of the Golden Dragon.

For around the last 60 years, on March 18th a Golden dragon dance, called “Kinryu no mai” is held to commemorate the legend. At the start of the festival, local male volunteers parade through the grounds of Sensoji temple carrying a long Golden Dragon whilst a cart full of local Geisha is pulled behind them. It’s a really good festival to photograph, it’s packed with people, police walk in front of the parade to keep people out of the way and it’s mobbed with photographers trying to get a shot. I find the best plan is to get a good spot and stand your ground as the parade passes.

As the parade made it’s way through the narrow streets of Nakamise dori leading up to the temple, I shot with my wide 24-70 lens on one body and my 50mm lens on my back up.

Then as the procession made it’s way to the wide open spaces in front of Sensoji temple I switched over to my 80-200m lens as the procession passed me and put my 24-70 onto my back up to get some nice wide shots to show what it was like with the crowd. As the Geisha were passing me I had a good angle and good light to rattle off some shots with my 80-200mm lens of one of the Geisha inside the float which ended up being my favourites of the day.

Once the Geisha float had passed and I was on the outside of the crowd I got some decent shots with the long lens again. As you can probably see from the crowd I had to shoot over a pile of people, so it was hard to aim blind, so I used the live view on the back of my camera which I was holding above my head and got some OK shots. Some not bad images for stock.

Recently I was out with my wife and some of her friends and we went to several restaurants, ate and drank lots and then ended up using some of the photos I took for a recent article in Metropolis magazine by Japan’s most celebrated drinks columnist, Nick Coldicott. For the article we also had to go round Tokyo’s Korea town in Shin Okubo with my wife and drink some more…hard life

Anyway, back to the dining part. As I said, we went out with my wife’s friends for dinner and we ended up in 3 restaurants. First off, one of my favourites, Korean BBQ. A meat lovers heaven if ever there was, a big table with a grill in the middle and mountains of meat and veg to pile on, cook and enjoy whilst washing it down with a few beers.

After that, off to a seafood grill restaurant for seconds, this time a bit of a lighter meal in a very basic no frills restaurant where the seafood is plucked out of a tank, sometimes mixed with some herbs and cheese and then plonked on your table grill and washed down with some soju (rice wine) which doesn’t taste so great, but does pack a punch.

After that when we were full to bursting and had already had a fair bit to drink and were feeling quite merry we were off to a makgeoli (sometimes spelt makkoli) bar for more to drink. Now, makgeoli is a fine drink, it’s a bit of a milky rice wine, very easy to drink, served from a stone bowl into smaller wooden bowls and supped slowly along with some Korean snack food such as pajon, a kind of savoury pancake. This bar, along with a couple we went to with Nick made for the main body of the recent article in Metropolis which you can read hereif you are interested. Anyway, I was glad we had ate a lot as we had a few bowls of it and if we hadn’t ate so much I think I would have been crawling home…don’t actually remember how we got home, just as well the photos turned out OK. Maybe I should drink more when I shoot…

And here are some of the out takes from the magazine anyway.