My Father, John Storey (Pictured above) is a damn fine human being, a man who taught me what integrity means and made it forever impossible for me to look at oil paintings of countryside scenes without slipping into a boredom induced coma, thanks to his vain attempts to educate me in the arts as a…
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If you are feeling sinister
I believe in magic – Outtake
On the night I shot the “I believe in magic (pt2)” picture I also shot some natural light shots of the model Nami. This was one of my favorites, something about the serious look in her eyes.
I believe in magic (pt2)
Another shot from my series “I believe in magic”. (see another HERE) This time thanks goes to the model, the lovely Nami, who I will miss a lot when she leaves for Canada at the end of the week. It was damn cold the night we shot this and I didn’t have an assistant so…
A 500 year old soba restaurant, enough sake to floor a sumo wrestler, very non-zen zen gardens and being picked up by girls in bars – My Kyoto trip
The Tokyo Reporter – Jake Adelstein
‘The Tokyo Reporter‘, a fantastic blog about the darker and more salubrious aspects of life in Japan is using one of my pictures (taken at the FCCJ during the authors talk about the book) in an article about Jake Adelstein, the author of ‘Tokyo Vice’ a book about the authors 12 year stint as a…
Ogose
Had a lovely hungover day out in Ogose in Saitama with Falsalama and his lovely girlfriend recently.
A beautiful wood with several waterfalls.
Just what the doctor ordered, fresh deep lungfuls of air and nature weaving her calming spell on me.
Of course, I managed to find a little darkness in all that beauty, as is the uchujin way.
The inevitable darkness I managed to find was the poster below, tacked onto a public toilet.It says that on the 2nd of June a 27 year old man from Yamagata prefecture disappeared in the woods. What with the suicide rate in Japan being what it is I hope he’s ok.
And finally, we have this scary looking guy, 鬼蜘蛛 ’Onigumo’ in Japanese, which means devil spider (!), Araneus ventricosus, a species of orb weaving spider. Near where we had parked the car at the bottom of the wood there were many of them. Apparently not dangerous, but I don’t trust an insect or arachnid with that colouring!
I highly recommend Ogose if you find yourself out that way in ‘Dasaitama’ ;-)
Yamanaka Lake
A set at Yamanaka lake from our trip on Saturday.
Something oddly melancholy about swan shaped boats in the late autumn sunset.
Dolphin meat, Fuji and Hiroshi Sugimoto (not in that order)
Dolphin Meat (イルカ) for sale in Numazu,Shizuoka
I send my thoughts to far off destinations
The Flower Of The Dead
死人花 – The Flower of the dead
I know its really autumn now.
Not just because I’m starting to feel the looming of S.A.D.,the change in the temperature requiring no fan to sleep or the noticably shorter days.
No, it is the Lycoris radiata, Red Spider Lily, Cluster Amaryllis – ‘The Flower Of The Dead’, that can been seen flowering at this time of year that signals that the Autumn equinox is only days away and that we have almost completed yet another yearly cycle of seasons.
This beautiful flower originally came from China but only the female variety made it to Japan so missing its male half the plant cannot reproduce via pollen transfer as most other flowers do.
Highly posionous, the bulbs contain toxic alkaloids that if ingested cause paralysis of the central nervous system and ultimately death. For this reason they were often, in pre cremation times, planted in graveyards to prevent wild animals eating the corpses.
The stalks however contain some edible proteins and so it was often planted on the narrow paths between the rice paddies to be used as emergency food if the rice harvests were poor.
The flower has many names here in Japan, some say as many as 900:-
“Manjushage” 曼珠沙華 is taken from a line in the Buddhist Lotus sutra, refering to a red flower
“higan-bana” 彼岸花、flower of the autumn equinox
“shibito-bana” 死人花, the flower of the dead
“jigoku-bana” 地獄花、flower of hell
To name but 4.
In Japanese mythology it is the flower that grows along the banks of the river that one must cross after death or the flower that grows in hell.
There are many haiku written about this flower where it is often assosiated with lonliness and death.
Above all though it is really beautiful, I remember the first time I saw one a few years ago as I was walking to work one bright autumn day, it made me stop in my tracks.
I have always taken photos of them whenever I have seen them since that first time, this year I even saw a white one for the first time. Which I believe is called a Lycoris albiflora, a natural hybrid.
Lycoris albiflora
They always leave me feeling slightly melancholy but awed by the fact that even someone as cynical as me can still be rendered speechless and motionless by a simple flower.
No one emerges triumphantly
Ah, sleeping guy, nice light, geometric elements. One for the collection…(crouch) (click) (click) wait a sec, WTF?? Is that a tube coming from his………and leading into that plastic bag………….????
Jim and all that jazz – 5D mkII video editing
I haven’t really been using the video function on my 5D, I’m not a videographer and I already have ridiculous amounts of hard drives filled with photo files, last thing I need is to start getting into HD video with all the huge files and possible new video cards mess that will get me into.
However, recently I was browsing my recent pictures folder and discovered I had 2 videos that would work together rather well.
‘I’ll just layer them together’ I naively thought.
Just drop them into some video editing software, cross fade between the two and voila.
Of course, it wasn’t that easy……it never is.
Cue several hours of google searches and transcoding video to come up with the short and not particularly impressive video at the top of this post.
I can see this whole thing is going to cause me headaches, but I love a challenge so be prepared for more.
*This video contains scenes of Jim O’Connell used without his permission and should , as with all things Jim, have an 18+ rating ;-)*
Yasukuni-Update
Yuko Katsuta and Uchujin, The bridge overlooking Yasukuni dori, august 15th 2009 If you’ve read my previous post on Yasukuni August 15th then hopefully you’ll remember the wonderful old woman I mentioned meeting on the bridge overlooking the entrance to the shrine. Well today I arrived home to find a letter from her. A point…
Yasukuni-August 15th
August the 15th is the anniversary of the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II.
Every year on this day 1000’s of people go to the controversial Yasukuni shrine in Kudanshita to pay their respects to the war dead (including the 14 class A war criminals whose souls are intered there).
Jim O’Connell in the New York Times
My good friend Mr Jim O’Connell’s photo was on the front page of the New York Times web edition yesterday. There is much more to come I’m told.He’s already blogged about it here so I am just posting this to say congratulations old chap and look forward to seeing more.
Toast the living and the dead who’ve gone before me
From a recent Lucky Strike promotion where one cigarette in the box had a message on it.
It’s killed at least 3 family members that I know of.
In a CT scan I had recently some ‘nodes’ were detected in both of my lungs that could possibly maybe be the beginnings of emphysema. (The Doctor didn’t even mention it as the CT scan was for something unrelated, only when I asked him about it did he suggest ‘smoking less’).
And yet, this picture is of a cigarette I smoked.
Helpless drug addict? weak willed pathetic idiot?? Loser???
If so I’m not alone.
One of us dies every 6.5 seconds worldwide , more even than the one every 15 minutes who commit suicide here in Japan, and yet that’s effectively what we are doing.
I stopped for 2 years in my twenties, but started again and within 2 days of the first puff in 2 years I was back on a pack a day.
Almost everyone I know who has tried to quit has fallen off the wagon.
Fuck this is depressing, I’m off to drink a coffee and smoke a fag.
EDIT!!!!
Lest anyone else should think that this post is overly serious or that I am genuinely depressed about this.
Here (courtesy of my Public Relations officer Mr Bill Hicks) is what I really think about smoking.
Nathan Shanahan
Nathan Shanahan by me A few weeks ago I assisted for a very talented and very friendly Australian photographer friend here in Tokyo.Nathan Shanahan is one of the few full time working photographers I know and in an effort to increase my own understanding of how the industry works here in Tokyo and other aspects…
Jehad?
For the past few weeks Jehad Nga a freelance New York Times photojournalist, trainer whore ;-) and a deeply interesting and knowledgeable man has been hanging out with us here in Tokyo.
Falsalama
Photographer, real ordained Nagpa (Tibetan Buddhist Tantric lay priest) and my vajra brother. Quite possibly the realest, most honest human being I know. He’ll try to tell you different but I taught him all he knows ;-) Last night I spent a few hours in a darkened underpass with Falsalama, taking this photograph of which…
The Borg?
(Photographic evidence!, A Rare portrait of a Borg Japanese Male – Taken by Star Fleet operative intrepid photographer Motionid) “We are the Borg The Japanese. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.” The Borg…
Danger uncool alert – Flower Macros!
Last night I borrowed a set of Canon extension tubes from a photographer friend, the rather lovely Gullevek.
Today I took way too many macro shots of flowers.
Capt. Muju
It’s been a long month.
The Beats exhibition, house guests, domestic travel, increasing temperatures and the usual slew of rude people on the trains.
Not much time for photography or keeping up with my rss feeds and even less time for blog writing.
I did find time, however, to shoot a portrait of a dear friend and his lovely girlfriend who stayed with us for a week or so though.
Meet ‘Muju’.
It must be 15 years that we’ve been friends now and it still feels as inspiring and fresh as it did when we first met.
An extremely talented artist and photographer, a dub fiend and an oasis of calm in a crazy world, Muju is responsible for me first picking up a camera for anything other than holiday snaps and must be credited with introducing me to Buddhism long before he was the catalyst that first made me go to India thereby changing the course of my life forever.
I feel genuinely lucky to be his friend and even though we now live on opposite sides of the world, his thinking and world view are still so much a part of me that the debt I owe him for all he has shown me and all we have shared is unrepayable.
But enough eulogising.
The portrait of Mr and Mrs Muju was shot in a local park with three nikon speedlights, a couple of umbrellas and a little red LED flashlight.
The idea was to get all the elements in one shot.
The easiest way of course would have been to shoot Mr and Mrs Muju, the glowing Muju doll (handmade by Mrs Muju and part of a huge family of Muju dolls) and the light painting as seperate shots and composite them in photoshop afterwards, but where’s the fun in that?
What you see is essentially what came out of the camera (obviously cleaned up a little – stray hairs, slight contrast adjustments etc.)
Muju can be found all over the interwebs, but of particular interest are :-
Drop buy and order a Muju doll or a muju T-shirt or even a print of one of his amazing drawings.
Oh and if Mr or Mrs Muju are reading this:-
It was GREAT to see you both, lets not leave it so long next time.
Big huge Jah love to you both :-)
The Tokyo Beats presents ‘The War Against Reality’
The Tokyo Beats are proud to announce ‘the war against reality’ A Photographic Exhibition La Vela Cafe, Shibuya, Tokyo 1st April – 30th April 2009 For more info and a downloadable pdf map to the venue see:- promo.tokyobeats.com and more info on the beats at:- tokyobeats.com Hope to see you there!!!
Takemura Noa – Portrait shoot
I recently shot a very sweet Japanese ‘talento’ girl, 竹村乃亜 (Takemura Noa) for her portfolio and web site.