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

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….

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.

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…

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….

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…

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??

Went to see my German friend DJ Shokkaboy Play last night, the pictures can be seen here. I will write more later, but I’m on my way out again (made a little progress with the assignment from the last post).

I will eventually get some serious sleep, but not till Monday night most likely….

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…*

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……

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…

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

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…

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…

I finally got some pictures up from the Emperor’s cup wrestling back in January, click the banner above to take a look at muscular men in tight oufits doing their thing….

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…