Tokyo Wedding Photographer » Wedding, event and portrait photography in Tokyo

Rotten Apple

It would appear my macbook has bitten the dust AGAIN, as a result it is going for a nice vacation with the apple technicians AGAIN, so far it has had a new logic board a new super drive and a new power supply in a matter of months. I should be back online later today as I am currently building my Windows box again, however things may not go entirely to plan…..

Sorry to those of you looking for the “push” pictures from yesterday, I’ll get them up as soon as possible….

*Update* A new logic board (again), Hard drive, CD ROM drive, bottom case, inner case and screen bezel later, my machine is back and working, at least at the moment….

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Time for a change

Today I finally replaced my old watch which I managed to misplace when I last went swimming. I chose a time-piece by the Japanese watchmaker Orient Star. After much dilberation I settled upon a nice stainless design with a black face.

It features an automatc mechanism, with a 40 hour power reserve and seems to be quite happy with the amount of hand motion that I make as the needle was showing full winding by the time I got home from the store, so I shouldn’t ever have to wind it.

In other news I also replaced the battery in my alarm clock as it had stopped running, thankfully I always set a second alarm and so wasn’t late getting up this morning…

The gallery is using another of the airtight interactive plugins for lightroom.

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

New Toys

Airtight interactive have released new versions of their picture viewers, which now integrate fully with Adobe lightroom(which is my picture management solution of choice). I shall be seeing if there is a useful place for me to use them as thy are pretty neat flash solutions, for certain types of gallery presentations…

Click here for an example of one of the styles using more pictures from Korea.

Comments and suggestions are very much welcomed as I am still not certain how useful they will be…

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Back in Town

I’m back in Tokyo after my recent trip to Korea, apologies to anyone who tried to call me while I was away, I’m currently delving through the emails I received while I was there.

Korea was kind of like returning back to an old haunt. I got to hang out with an old colleague and get more than my fair share of galbi. I also got to hang out with some old friends and spend a lazy Sunday afternoon sat in a roof garden drinking overpriced soft-drinks, it was almost enough to make me miss the place…

Some random pictures of people from the roof garden….





I’m currently trying to work out my plans for my summer trip to the north of Japan, probably to the Aomori prefecture. The biggest sticking point is the cost of hotels in Japan which are far from inexpensive….

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Finally…

The Shooto All Japan Grappling pictures are up. I wish I had a good excuse why they took so long, the best I can come up with is that I was working with a broken lens that day (and so was trying to shoot sports with manual focus and a sticky focus ring) therefore I had a lot of out of focus shots to work my way through to get to what you can see…

I’ll try to be more punctual with pictures in future…

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Random People

Just some random headshots, from my new favourite Tokyo bar, Combine. They don’t really have a home and so I figured I’d stick them up here….

One of these days I will get the shooto pictures uploaded, honest…. There are a couple of new sets of events photos up though including Roxanne’s fights at K-Grace


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

2 comments

shokkaboyJune 5, 2007 - 7:10 pm

“…from my new favourite Tokyo bar, Combine. ”

ah yeah…i remember ;)

MarieJune 6, 2007 - 7:28 pm

I really do want you to take a decent headshot of me. Cameras just make me nervous.
I called you before I left for Kyoto but there was no answer. Maybe I:ll see you Friday?

The Rule of Thirds

There is an important rule of thirds, regarding the composition of pictures, you can read about it here

Unfortunately today’s post relates to the other rule of thirds, which states “If at any time Paul boards a train with three or more bags he will lose the third one”. Usually I lose inconsequential things which is usually helpful as it lets me buy new ones, today however I was not so lucky as I was finally on my way, with nice weather, to take the remaining pictures for ‘that assignment’. Unfortunately taking pictures is kind of hard when your camera is no longer in your possession. Hopefully the awesomeness that is the Tokyo lost property system will work it’s magic and I will have it back again, otherwise some lucky soul will have acquired quite a nice photo outfit in the shape of a D200, 85mm 1.4 lens and a 2 Gig memory card…..

I just hope the backup body doesn’t fail over the next day or two as I have a bunch of things to shoot and am always a bit nervous about not having a spare…

*le sighs* Does anyone know of somewhere which offers careless idiot insurance??


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

2 comments

shokkaboyMay 23, 2007 - 4:30 pm

ohhhhhhhhhhh fuck
my bag didn’t make it from london to berlin. (with my dj stuff)
i’m fucked too

shokkaboy

[Sorry for the edit, but some folk are touchy about the language - Paul]

shokkaboyMay 28, 2007 - 6:47 pm

no prob.

just change it to “funk” :)
like in motherfunkerz ….

HATE HATE HATE

Today I am a grumpy camper…..

I have an assignment which has been troublesome from the beginning, I have worked with the client and finally have a specification which we are both happy with and I finally have a good grasp of their needs and desires (I’d talk about it in more detail, but am bound up in non-disclosure land).

There are however two salient points to the job, firstly that the photographs need to be taken in the dry, secondly due to the location involved, the best (only) time to take them is very early in the morning. As a result I have had a 4am alarm call the past two days.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to wake up to the sound of rain, and so could roll over and go back to sleep. Today I was not so lucky….

The precipitation waited until I was fully dressed, caffeined up and on my way to the station……

My life sucks

Hard

I may have to cry

*Coming up, more adventures at the apple service centre…*

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Party Party

On sunday I got invited to my good friend Ollie’s Girlfriend’s Birthday party, I took the camera, some flashes and some radio triggers and had some fun playing with them, I got to try out some new techniques which was nice as there was no real presure to capture every moment. I still need to nail down a solution to people being too close to the flash head, leading to them getting blown out,I’m not sure what the answer is, but it is a frustration. The fact that the “flash off” button on the nikon D200 doesn’t work when you are shooting with pocket wizards is a bit annoying, though there really must be a work-around. Does anyone have a good method to keep the contrast in the image when it starts to get smokey, yet you still want to use the flash? Answers in the comments please….

Click the image or here to see the rest of the pictures from the party…


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Miscellaneous Updates

This week has had it’s ups and downs. The downs have mostly been related to technology failing on me. Firstly came the death of my 85mm lens which seized up making focusing very difficult, then my Macbook power supply cable caught fire which is a surprisingly common complaint, finally today I also discovered that my macbook CD drive will not accept audio CDs (can you feel my love for apple….).
On the upside all of the relevant service centres have been reasonably helpful in particular Yobodashi Camera who I expected to try and return my lens to be repaired, just offered me a replacement straight off the bat, which I expected to have to fight for. The apple-care people have been reasonably helpful so far but seemed to imply this is only as I have a warranty with them and that this helpfulness will cease once this expires and I shall have to resort to being an angry customer.
I have also been having problems with my mail arriving, this has caused problems as things like my phone bill have not been delivered. I eventually gave in and went to the post office and had a whine and moan about it, they pleaded innocence, however later that day I received a whole stack of mail . This may however have been a coincidence, but I’m sceptical….

On a more positive note last night I went to see Shokkaboy DJ at club Lush, which was very very fun indeed, a nice small venue with shades of the Asylum which is always a good thing. Putting a live performance were “Electro/New Rave” band Reloaded 21 Film who have some great tunes and come thoroughly recommended. I ran into a couple of fellow GYBO posters and ended up going to an after party with Mr.Mu$ic which resulted in me being quite tired when I arrived home at 9am this morning. Good thing I didn’t have any work to do this weekend (aside from finishing up the Shooto pictures, sorry to those of you waiting on them, they are almost finished….).

Shokkaboy is DJing again next Saturday at club Oto in Shinjuku, I will definitely be there so if anyone is in town and wants to party hard, give me a shout…


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Shooto All Japan Championships

Yesterday I attended the Shooto All Japan Grappling Championships, I would have been competing if not for the knee but I was cornering my friend (Ollie Jones, who won the Light Heavyweight category). I have a number of pictures which will go up in due course, look for them here sometime today.

It was a good event for WKs winning 3 of the 6 weight classes, which is even more impressive when you realise we only had 4 entrants. I really wish that I had been fit to enter as frankly the talent pool at my weight class was pretty shallow indeed….

I was unfortnately hampered by a lens failure, so tomorrow I shall be practicing my “it’s broken, I need a refund” Japanese. I hope they do not try to ‘send it for servicing’ as frankly I expect a little more than 2 weeks life from a $1500 piece of equipment, and do not want to be without it for however long the “servicing process” takes…


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

1 comment

www.StrikingShots.com -- Blog IndexJune 23, 2007 - 10:17 pm

[...] Shooto All Japan Grappling pictures are up. I wish I had a good excuse why they took so long, the best I can come up with is [...]

Possible Downtime…

My Webhost is upgrading some of their hardware this evening, they claim that there should be no downtime, however I have heard this before and frankly I don’t trust them too much….

In other news I was pointed towards http://www.colourlovers.com, which is a useful site for those who are looking for complementary pallettes and tasteful colours. I found this a great help and it gave me a little bit of inspiration towards the current colour scheme. Obviously you will now all start making fun of it and I’ll change it again……

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Colour Woes

I’m a photographer, I’m supposed to have an artistic bent and an eye for colour, yet I cannot for the life of me come up with an acceptable colour scheme for this site.

Personally I quite liked the brown and tan that we had until today when yet another person commented on it looking like mud (or other unpleasant things), so I felt that a change was in order. Thankfully as the site is built using style sheets it is relatively trivial to alter the colour schemes at least from a coding point of view.

Actually picking the colours however is another matter entirely, I shall be honest and say that the whole website experience has given me a new found level of respect for the people who specialise in design. I am becoming increasingly convinced that whilst ‘doing it myself’ was a fun project and taught me a ton about HTML and so on, I really should bring someone in to do a complete re-write of the site from the ground up.

I’m going to see how the new cool grey scheme grows on me, but frankly I’m unconvinced. Anyone with suggestions for an improved colour scheme, feel free to make your thoughts known in the comments…

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

1 comment

MarieApril 17, 2007 - 1:18 am

I like the grey.

In my fictitious site redsign I’ve picked out a graphic that I like and I’m suting that as my colour palette. It’s very spring. (Knowing my procrastination it’ll be next spring before I even get anything done and those colours will be so passe!)

Tilting and Shifting

I was out on Saturday pricing and taking test shots for a possible client and realised I wasn’t having as much fun as usual, and that I had lost some of the entertainment value from just making pictures. This stems from the fact that getting ‘good’ pictures is relatively routine and that getting something special takes a certain amount of luck or inspiration. Thankfully there is a good counter to this malaise and that is buy a new toy, and there is nothing more toy like than the lensbaby which went on sale in Japan today.

The lens baby is completely manual from having to drop in carboard pieces to adjust the aperture, through the lack of acurate metering through to having to deform the extension tube to focus, it may not be easy to get sharp pictures but boy is it fun….

The yield of sharp images from this lens is pretty low, but I’m sure within a month or so I’ll have it sussed…

In other news my knee is slowly healing, I’m guessing another week or two before I am able to walk unhindered and I reckon I can get back to the gym at least gently some time this summer, and should be back in full training by my birthday in October, which is better than Christmas which I had initially feared…


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

1 comment

www.StrikingShots.com -- Blog IndexNovember 13, 2007 - 9:00 pm

[...] have written about lensbabies before and it is fair to say that this is not the correct lens for taking product shots with, also for the [...]

Burn your Digital Cameras…

The EPUK is reporting that the independent one of the leading newspapers in the UK has declared that film is the future and that from now on they will only be dealing with Kodax Tri-X film.

In other news Google has an innovative way to reduce the costs of installing broadband, they are calling it Google TiSP. I am impressed at their innovative use of existing infrastructure and nano-bot technology.

Ryan Air are now offering flights to a new destination.

Never has a Sunday had so much hot news…

Update: Google have been rolling out a load of new features today, with GMail paper being unveiled also

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Paying Adobe’s Mortgage

I have recently purchase lightroom from Adobe, which has become a pretty central piece of my workflow, which thankfully was quite reasonably priced. I have however just seen the prices for Creative Suite 3 over on Gizmodo which I shall also be purchasing (I will want the “Web Premium” edition, full price $1600). Whilst I will get a certain amount of discount due to being an upgrader and am well aware of the history of it being ‘non-cheap’ software, I do think that Adobe owe me some kind of cookie based product. It is somewhat annoying but the increase in working speed that running natively on intel processors gives me will undoubtably pay for itself over the lifetime of the software.

Oh well it’s only 3 months rent, or nearly the price of a noct. Nikkor…

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

2 comments

erizabesuMarch 30, 2007 - 5:18 pm

Paul, Oh dear, you’ve drifted into dangerous trans Atlantic waters with that quiz you took.

What a comprehensive site you have built, and the photos are stunning!

May I link my unworthy blather to you?

e

PaulMarch 30, 2007 - 5:27 pm

Hey Elizabeth,
Feel free to link over to here. We should have dinner some time, I’m sure it’s my fault we haven’t met recently, when is good for you?

Paul

And it all comes crashing down…

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!

My knee gave up on me again tonight, I hope it just popped out slightly and will heal quickly. If it is, as I think likely my meniscus, I will probably need surgery and if that happens I probably won’t be able to train hard again until 2008. This line of thinking may have made me cry a little, but I’m a big boy and will get over it.

Curse my weak and feeble frame…

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

PIE 2007

So today I took time to go to the Adobe press conference held at the Photo Imaging Expo. Here in Tokyo. It was quite informative, with regards what Adobe see’s as important steps forward with regards digital imaging and confirmed what we had all been fearing, two levels of photoshop “photoshop CS3″ and “photoshop CS EXTENDED”. As far as I could gather from the sneak peak that they showed the majority of the extended features are concerned with video editing, which seems to be a direction Adobe was quite keen to stress, the convergence between still and moving images throughout it’s products. Speaking to the engineers afterwards they mentioned some architectural and shading applications which would also be ‘extended’ only but it would appear that the majority of photographers will probably only need the standard edition.

I managed to confirm a few details about Lightroom also and it seems as if the engineers really are paying attention as every question I had about things which I wanted to have seen (and hadn’t) either were things they had tried and failed to implement or seemed to be genuinely to be working towards (they said the network drives should be ready by ver. 2, but is proving to be a MAJOR headache) and that flash output of the slideshows should be (re-)introduced in the very near future.

I’m off to buy my copy of lightroom later today as I only have 3 days left of my trial version and am well and truly on the bandwagon.

Later I shall post a roundup of the rest of PIE2007 including large numbers of photos of random women holding technical products…


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Treating Myself

Retail therapy is good, especially when you can enjoy buying something useful. In this case the random purchase was a new note-book. I needed one which was small enough to pocket and add to my every day carry stuff (keys, phone, wallet and watch).

Obviously I could have bought something nice and cheap from the 100Â¥ store, but instead found an awesome leather bound one, I also picked up a complementary mechanical pencil which is small enough to fit inside the spine of the book. Hopefully this will bridge the gap which the death of my palm left last year that has never been properly addressed….

There have been other purchases recently too, but I’m saving those for another post, when they arrive


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Like Myspace Only Good

There’s a new social networking s(h)ite in town, called Virb, it’s a bit like myspace, letting you put all your paraphenalia in one convenient place and wonder why the girl who shows her boobies has way more friends than you. It seems like it’s as if myspace and flickr had an offspring. It also has the all important “TURN OFF CUSTOMISATIONS” button which will prevent the design impared (like me) from ruining the whole experience with their eye-bleeding, flashing spinning backgrounds. These monstrosities are more likely to cause an eppileptic fit than anything else and along with the music are the reason I loath Myspace.

Anyhow, if you’re all into the web 2.0 paradigm and want an invite to the private Beta leave a comment (with an email address) and I’ll get you invited…. For those of you who aren’t here’s a duck photo….

PS. Friend me please….


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

4 comments

TaylorFebruary 26, 2007 - 4:26 am

I am really curious how many of these social networking sites the Internet can absorb. I hope Virb has more than a few new features and isn’t simply re-inventing the wheel. I’m excited to check it out.

I’d love an invite if you could send one my way.

taylormingos.com » Virb.comFebruary 26, 2007 - 4:49 am

[...] work today I was surfing and came across this article which unearths yet another new web 2.0 social-networking site. The website is currently in [...]

PaulFebruary 26, 2007 - 7:27 am

Invite sent….

leslieMarch 19, 2007 - 11:16 pm

Hello, came over from the new duckpond, the ORG, and found your blog. Sure, send me an invite to the beta :)

Monkey Monkey

Once more it is far too late to write a lengthy post, appologies for that maybe next week…..

Today Ollie, his girlfriend, Nori, Keita and I went to Ueno Zoo, the pictures can be seen here in the new and expanding events section of the gallery.

Assuming I get up in time I plan on going to watch the shooto grappling tournament tomorrow, obviously I’ll take some pictures to wow you with….


Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

no comments

Perspective…

These are fast changing times in which we live:

I’ll write a better post later, but frankly the weekend has just started and I want to take a nap before I go to training…

Contact Me|Share on Facebook|Email Post|Back to the Top

1 comment

fenFebruary 17, 2007 - 7:11 am

Hmm, there are a couple of things that this doesn’t quite look into with it’s predictions. As it’s assuming an indefinate exponential growth for technology.

But also, from my standpoint this goes a long way towards explaining why humans are breaking down with stress and mental illnesses more and more. Society is forcing humans to live in styles and conditions that historically we’re not designed for. As a species we’re used to long-term (lifetime) jobs in small close nit communities.

It’s food for thought. But I’m sure there will be some kind of crash before the end of this century. Maybe the Amish have it right. :P

T w i t t e r
F a c e b o o k