Photography & More

It’s Saturday afternoon in Tokyo and I’m at the heart the Japanese suburban culture, the iconic family restaurant.

The food is mediocre at best and the crowded, smoky air make it an unpleasant place to spend more time than you would want to, but what really intrigues me about these places is the unpretentious nature of the people you see here. This is suburban Japan unmasked, where families, many of whom are live on a single income come for lunch or dinner, screaming and squabbling kids in tow.

The family restaurant has the perfect solution for its clientele. The ‘Drink Bar’ offers unlimited refills of soft drinks, tea, coffee and cappuccino. The menus are adorned with the customary ‘Sets’; easy to decipher combinations of various dishes such as a pizza, salad and rice combos with the drink bar or a hamburg steak with cheese, fries, salad and, you guessed it, drink bar. They offer a kids menu too. All of these dishes are priced well within the suburban budget and a meal for a family of four is going to cost less than 4000 yen, around $40.

The experience is what I find fascinating in the family restaurant, particularly around the busiest times of the day when throngs of people from the surrounding suburban sprawl crowd the entrance, before being summoned by the overzealous waiters and waitresses to their allocated tables.

Getting a cappuccino at the drink bar is proving challenging today and at 1:15pm about ten people are waiting patiently for their turn. I notice two eyes staring up at me in fascination before a small hand clasping a plastic cup reaches out and silently asks for help. I oblige and fill her cup with lime green soda from the dispenser. She’s too small to do it on her own, but next year she’ll be tall enough. The crowd waiting around the drink bar thins out almost as quickly as it formed but they’ll be back for the next refill which I estimate to be in roughly ten minutes.

Constant chirps and at times screams of ‘irashaimase’, (welcome) and ‘arigatou gozaimasu’ (thank you very much), reverberate constantly through the restaurant, bouncing off the Italian themed wallpaper (angles and Michaelangelo frescoes), as people stream in and out through the green doors.

A gaggle of high school girls giggle and compare jewellery and various other objects which generate huge amounts of excitement. Before long they’ve crowded together for a group mobile phone portrait, and one emits a highly audible shriek, which is bad news for them. A waitress quickly comes over and whispers something to the group, I assume, she’s telling them to keep it down. I sense something else, though. They’ve probably been here for the last two hours and besides consuming vast amounts of soda and coffee, they haven’t ordered much else and now they’re almost becoming a nuisance and are taking up valuable real estate. The game is up when the manager, a tall man with gelled shiny black hair, a crisp white shirt, a red bow tie and a green waistcoat walks over and also whispers something to them. With a looks of resignation they gather their bags adorned with fluffy toys and copious other trinkets and make their way to join the queue waiting to pay. These girls have the last say though and they ask the cashier to split the bill. His veiled smile masks contempt and you can almost imagine what he wants to say, “What, in the last two hours all you’ve had is the drink bar, a pizza, a tomato salad and popcorn shrimp (deep fried shrimp) and now you want me to split the bill? There are five of you and you ordered three dishes. You figure it out.” He doesn’t say this though, it’s Japan after all and he carefully calculates what each of them owe and one by one they pull out their animated purses and settle the bill. When the group leaves, the ‘arigatou gozaimasu’ that follows them is more of a bark than a pleasant farewell.

It’s 2pm and the hoards streaming in are showing no signs of letting up. The mob at the door waiting to be seated is becoming increasingly restive and children are starting to squawk, fighting and bickering among themselves. The staff, while maintaining smiles all round, are close to panic; one slip up could spell disaster and they know it. The smiles are strained and last only as long as the customers can see their waitresses’ face, once she turns round the urgency returns and the smile vanishes and off she goes literally running into the kitchen.

A table with four mothers in their forties, two smoking heavily, accompanied by a group of ten children are finishing their meal. The squabbling bunch range from what I estimate is two to ten years of age. Leftover pizza crusts line the table along with half empty glasses of murky brown liquid, the result of combing two or more varieties of soda. Added to the mix are bits of minced burgers drenched in coagulated brown gravy which make for a sorrowful sight; even the yellow-brown fries have drooped in resignation and the whole sorry mess begs to be taken away and put out of its misery.

The children on a soda induced sugar high are becoming problematic to manage and already the bickering has started. The two year old screams when his sibling snatches away the blue toy car he was dribbling on – at least it was keeping him occupied. The mother looks on in a resigned way, ‘How can motherhood be so tormenting.’ Her strained face tells the story of many sleepless nights and frantic days trying to raise three children and she is close to giving up. With a stroke of divine intervention the older children spot something and like a pack of wild dogs on a hunt they momentarily glance in the same direction before heading to the courtyard with its wide open space and red contemporary art metal structure. One mother lights up a cigarette, takes a deep breath and blows a lung full of bluish smoke across the table; the two year old doesn’t stand a chance.

They all jump when a thump at the window announces the gang outside have spotted their mothers and one boy is pressing his face against the window hard enough to make him appear as though he were from another planet. The toddler is mesmerized for all of five seconds and then it’s back to the blue toy. The mothers turn away, trying to make the most of the fifteen minutes of solitude at their disposal and they sink into their seats like factory workers at the end of a ten hour shift.

At around 3pm the crowds have thinned out and a different demographic is coming into the restaurant, young couples in their late teens and early twenties. A young man leads his girlfriend in and her effusive smile says it all, ‘God, what a cheapskate.’ I’m possibly being on the cynical side here, perhaps they’re just stopping in for a quick bite to eat before negotiating their way through the masses at the nearby shopping mall. Whatever their situation, they order, eat quickly and leave hand in hand.

The momentary lull is broken by a shriek and this time it’s not a group of extroverted high school girls. A red faced couple are sitting in the middle of the smoking section, their pink, puffy faces suggesting they’ve had way too much red wine and the woman has lost some of her inhibitions. Another piercing yell and her boyfriend or partner is sitting head down, staring at the table. The fleeting glimpse I catch in his eye suggests whatever transgression he committed, it was worth it, but for now he’s in deep shit and he has to bare whatever abuse she is dolling out. I imagine her screaming, “To insult me even more, you had to screw that cheap slut! What am I too you – a convenience store?” He says nothing. Some people are starting to stare; this is a moment to be savored in a society where people pride themselves on preserving their dignity and saving face. The restaurant staff continue energetically wiping down tables as though this is nothing out of the ordinary. A short while later it seems all is well and the couple get up, pay and leave, the boyfriend lagging sheepishly a few paces behind.

It’s almost 4pm and all the panic seems forgotten as with a smile the cashier hands me my change and bids me farewell with a slightly more sincere, “Arigatou gozaimasu.” This valuable lull is what the staff need to recuperate before the next suburban rush starts in just over an hour.

Let’s be honest, as much us shutterbugs love going outside and shooting all day, once the winter sets in it gets that much harder to do. So, starting tomorrow and as part of my strategy to make up for the days lost due to cold or snowboarding, I’ve decided that my theme for the next week is going to be based on shots in and around my apartment in Ichikawa, near Tokyo. I don’t have a specific subject in mind and I’ll start shooting and hopefully from there I’ll be able to generate some new and interesting ideas. Watch this space and check out my Flickr pics to see how this unfolds.

Wishing you all a happy weekend!

Before the plug-in

With the plug-in applied

Part of the joys and, let’s be realistic, the let downs of photography are about anticipation and expectation. After getting up at 5 am in the middle of winter to catch the golden hour, the first thing you want to do when you get home is to have a hot cup of something and copy the contents of your memory card to your Mac or pc. Then it’s a case of being ecstatic as your masterpieces come to life on the screen draped in beautiful golden tones or an anti-climax magnified by the lack of sleep followed by disappointment when the golden hour turns into a meltdown of blurred images and blown highlights. In hindsight you know better than to try and take photos of the sunrise if there are strong contrasts or you tell yourself you should have underexposed the images to try and preserve the highlights and some of the tones. The latter scenario seems downright depressing, bur before you hit the delete key…

Lightroom 2 has some nifty plug-ins and while a bad photo shouldn’t and often can’t be rescued, there are instances where a good photo fell on hard times (ok, that’s going a bit far), and may have been overexposed or the colours just don’t compliment the shot.

Here’s where plug-ins are a great asset. There are a plethora of these available free of charge or for purchase. Head over to the Adobe Lightroom Exchange website and take a look at what’s on offer. On the Lightroom Killer Tips blog, Matt Klowskowski, who produces most of the content on the blog, regularly and very generously makes a lot of plug-ins available for free. One of the great things about the plug-ins is that they’re simple to install and as with most editing in Lightroom, they can be applied non-destructively, so when you apply the plug-in, all it takes is a simple ‘Edit and Undo’ click and you are back to where you were. Or even simpler, in the ‘Develop’ field just look at the history of your editing and undo or redo from there.

In the two shots I’ve posted here, there’s a ‘Before and After’ of the same image. The image on the top being the ‘Before’ shot. The shot was taken at a florist in Ginza, central Tokyo, late in the afternoon and while the image itself is of reasonable quality and the pink tones compliment it, what I think the shot lacks is something which makes it stand out and say, ‘Look at Me!’. So after cropping and making some minor adjustments to the exposure and saturation, I tried the ‘Lomo’ pre-set. That looked okay but not what I wanted. Next, I tried, ‘High Key Effects’; hmmm, getting there. Time to go a bit crazy. How about a combination of both pre-sets? Yup, that’s more like it.

So with a bit of tinkering with very cool and useful tools, I’ve transformed an average looking shot into something more exciting with unusual tones that work well in this particular instance.

It’s Friday night which means the weekend has just about started, so happy shooting!

At times I get mighty frustrated when I can’t get something to work . How many of us have felt our temperatures rise when we’re sitting behind our computers and following instructions step-by-step on how to sharpen the details in the eyes of a portrait shot or trying to create a layer with an addition we think would look really nice and no matter what we do, it just doesn’t work – or we’re doing something wrong. Tonight I had one of those moments and just realized that although I’m pretty competent at using Lightroom 2 having now mastered the first and second generation, when it comes to Photoshop Elements, I’m still in my infancy. What usually happens is that when I’ve taken a break and decide to try it again, is the solution stares me straight in the face and the energy spent ranting about how user manuals are more often than not a waste of time and money, could have been spent on writing or editing some pictures. Ugh!

In a recent post I wrote about my expectations for the year in terms of photography, my blog and what I’m hoping to read about on other blogs. Just to recap, I’ve decided to narrow down what I write about. So instead of writing about photography in the broad sense, I’m going to focus on my camera, a Nikon D90, the lenses I use along with a significant emphasis on software. I use Adobe Lightroom 2 and the more I use it the more I enjoy the myriad of functions it performs – which is pretty much everything in the workflow from start to finish. For finer details I use Photoshop Elements, but Lightroom pretty much does it all, which is why I’ve changed my the catch phrase on my blog to ‘Photography with Lightroom and a few Elements.

Happy shooting!

Over the last few weeks on my almost daily virtual pilgrimage to the hallowed ground of Flickr Explore, I have started to have doubts about originality and creativity of what I am seeing, I ask of you God of Photography, please forgive me.

If I see another retro-styled shot with faded tones, especially greens or blues, a subject lined with background illuminating sun rays or a miniature Amazon.com box shaped figurine, I might start to question whether people are actually making an effort to express themselves individually or just trying to mass produce images that draw a lot of attention and earn them enough page views and comments to get them onto Explore.

I’m in no way criticizing the people who took these pictures, I’m simply making a point:

Here’s what I mean. From Flickr Explore on January 5 2010.

A note on the images. I have added a link to the original images on Flickr as these are not images I have taken.

It seems that photography in the modern era has become consumer driven hype, if the Flickr Explore pages are anything to go by. Some months back High Dynamic Range (HDR) was wildly popular, with a lot of extraordinary imagery, but with an equal amount way over the the top. Fortunately that fad has fallen by the wayside and some amount of perspective has returned, but in my opinion not enough, and from what I’ve mentioned above, a lot of photographers are too focused on what other people like and are not out there capturing their unique perspective on the world. That may sound contradictory – the reason people share their images on the web is to showcase their work to a wider audience and that has partly to do with what is determined as aesthetically pleasing at a current point in time.

My problem is, instead of being inspired by what I encounter on Explore, I find myself mostly looking at page after page of the same thing and that’s not good. I’m not looking for divine intervention, but a small spark of a new idea that will jump out of the page and purge me of my doubts. The next time I do find that image, I’ll write about it.

It’s 2010 and I’ve got a fair idea of what I want out of this year and hopefully most of my thoughts and plans will materialize into something concrete. As far as my blog is concerned I want to update it more frequently (don’t we all) and I’ve got a a few ideas I’m going to work with see what happens.

What makes people want to read a blog or better still, subscribe to it? In the world of Web 2.0, while we’re spoilt for choice, actually finding blogs that are worth spending reading takes a considerable amount of time. Let’s be honest, there’s a great deal of useful and enjoyable content out there, but significantly more that’s ‘lacking’. To be fair there are no set criteria for what determines if a blog is up to a certain standard, but I suppose it’s a truly democratic institution, if people like what you post, they come back again and vice versa.

I live in Japan and enjoy photography and writing and that’s what I try to reflect on my blog. I think for a blog to be classed as photo blog or photo journal, apart from needing decent quality images, the accompanying text should be strive to contextualise the images and tell a story – I had a little rant about this a while back.

Photography is an incredibly broad subject and if you choose to blog about this, where exactly do you start? I think trying to narrow it down is a step in the right direction.

Here are some of my thoughts for what my blog should focus on this year:

1) Photography in a particular place.

2) The camera, lenses, accessories and software I use.

3) The type of photography I enjoy most.

Some of what I would like to see from my fellow bloggers:

1) Blogs that are informative and educational, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips is fantastic in this department.

2) Avoiding posting a photo with an accompanying one-liner; that’s not a post.

3) In depth depressing musing and self pity (that’s my cynical side, sorry).

4) Having a blog containing nothing more than links to other websites – there is not point to this.

5) Uninformed, ignorant content and posts which offend and smear people that tell the truth. The mainstream media do enough of this already.

Here’s to a year of great blogging!

It’s a new year and after selling my final zoom lens shortly before the end of 2009 I’ve decided 2010 is going to be my Year of the Primes.

I bought my first dslr camera close on five years ago, a Nikon D70s, a camera I really enjoyed using and which produced great images under the right conditions. Under low light the noise was terrible, but at the time it was a good, affordable camera. I replaced it with a Nikon D90 at the end of 2008 and while it’s a no brainer that the D90 is a superior in just about all aspects, I’ve realized that while there’s no substitute for good quality glass. Added to that, a cheap to mid-range zoom will also produce different results under similar conditions, depending on the camera you’re using.

I’ve yet to see this being discussed or debated at any length, but it is something I believe is important when first time buyers – or even people wanting to buy additional lenses should consider before parting with their  hard-earned cash. A case in point was the kit lens I got with my D70s, the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5. Although this was a mid-priced lens, on the D70s it produced great pictures all round. I eventually sold this lens and bought a much more expensive Nikon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR and this lens too worked pretty well with the camera. The problems or rather disappointments started when I bought the D90 and used this lens on it. I used this lens/camera combination for over a year but was never particularly impressed with the image quality and actually used this lens less and less throughout most of last year. I found I was using my Nikon 50mm f/1.8 and Nikon 35mm f/2 a lot more and was a lot happier with the quality of the images.

During December last year I bought a Nikon 24mm f2.8 and was set on buying a Nikon 60mm f/2.8 Micro, but on the advice of a friend opted for a used Nikon 105mm f/2.8 VR Micro. In the short time I’ve used both lenses I’ve been really pleased with what they’ve produced. The camera meters better when using these lenses compared with zooms and I’m not continuously zooming in and out trying to find the focal length I want; with prime lenses you compose and shoot, it’s that simple. It’s great walking around and thinking about the shot you want to take and how it’s going to work with a lens like a 24mm f2/8 and I find it less complicated than using a zoom lens.

Mid-priced prime lenses are going to cost more than zoom lenses and some people may prefer the flexibility of having an all-in-one lens, and in some instances I may wish I had a zoom with me for those spontaneous ‘in the moment’ shots, but for now I’m going prime.

Sorry girls and guys, I’m going to pour water on the circuit board of Apple’s mythical tablet to attempt to short circuit the noise, because frankly, there’s too much of it. I’m highly doubtful the Cupertino clan are going to release a tablet computer, for the following reasons:

Rumours, rumours, rumours. Granted, Apple is a highly secretive organization, and they characteristically never announce new products before launch. But despite the revelations of patent applications, domain registrations and ‘leaked’ product information, very little has appeared over the past few weeks that hasn’t been known for what – years now? Oh, Apple have booked a venue in San Francisco for late January. Perhaps we’re going to see a new and improved iTunes or cheaper Macbooks or iMacs; other than that I can’t think of any major announcement. Let’s not forget, it’s the first quarte,r barely a month after the Christmas holiday season shopping spree. The timing would be less than ideal for cash strapped consumers in an economic depression.

Why a tablet? I’m an Apple fan through and through and when people here in Japan had doubts about how the iPhone would perform, I knew it was only a matter of time before the device made its mark here. I’ve been proved right, the iPhone has been one of the top selling mobile phone for the past several months, but I still can’t figure out why Apple would want to produce a tablet and I remain deeply skeptical about who Apple intends to market this device to. The only place I’ve seen a tablet being used is in an electronics shop to record customer information.

Apple did not invent the wheel, they perfected it. Let’s face it, Apple does what any good company does; it scrutinizes the market, looks for opportunities where the competition are falling short and with its brand power and Cupertino’s best engineering minds, makes great high quality products that awe consumers. The iPod arrived as the digital music was hitting the mainstream and it’s competitors have been trying to play catch up ever since. The iPhone is another example. There were other smart phones out there before it arrived, but none of them as good as the iPhone. The tablet has never had mass appeal, partly because the companies manufacturing them didn’t have a clear idea of who they were making their products for. So Apple would be taking the plunge into a market saturated with netbooks and smart phones and introduce a product that no one has wanted before, expecting to succeed. Not likely.  Despite wanting to buy just about every Apple product available, I don’t think I’m alone in saying I would hesitate before spending $600 plus on a something I can’t think of a practical use for. For Apple to change this perception is going to be difficult – and why would they want to? Let me repeat, Apple gets right what the competition doesn’t.

Practicality. In the unlikely event that Apple do announce they’re making a tablet, what we’re going to see is a $600 10-inch iPod touch. What are you supposed to do with it? Use it as an e-reader? Nope, the Kindle’s cheaper. A netbook? Nope, a Macbook is under $1000 and has way more features, processing power and a bigger screen. Other netbooks are much cheaper (but they’re not Macs). An iPod? Right, I have an iPod. A smart phone? Ha ha.

All of the above? Yes, smart phone aside, but that still leaves the question unanswered – Why?

As usual, any thoughts or comments are welcomed.