All posts filed under: Photography

Kurama Fire Festival

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This year’s Kurama Fire Festival was a mix of rain, mud and flames. I liked the costumes, but the degree of pyromania  and the level of drunken chaos was pretty tame compared to other fire festivals I’ve been to in Japan. I think the close proximity to Kyoto, and therefore the entire Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe metropolis means you get too many people for what is in reality quite a small event in a very small town. The big plus however is that the Kurama Fire Festival takes place on October 22nd the same day as Kyoto’s Jidai Matsuri. Watch the Jidai Matsuri in the afternoon then head over to Kurama for a smokey evening. This year the Jidai Matsuri was postponed by a day, but I wasn’t leaving Kyoto until I’d shot a samurai.

Umeda Sky Building

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Flew up to mainland Japan on Friday night. Landed at KIX then got the bus to Umeda in Osaka. Before heading on to Kyoto, I stopped in at Yodobashi Camera to get a new lens case and then took another look at the Umeda Sky Building. Exposure was about 15 seconds which causes the blurry clouds. I set the white balance to tungsten to give it the blue futuristic feel.

On the Bookshelf – Robert Capa

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Robert Capa was one of the great war photographers. He was also one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Capa covered five major conflicts from the Spanish Civil War in 1936 to the First Indochina War in ’54. His images of the D-day landings are perhaps Capa’s most haunting. The shots taken as he scrambled from the landing craft towards the beach are iconic. It feels almost absurd for me to sit in eerie silence and stare at an image that was taken during the chaos, violence and noise at Omaha Beach. Capa was masterful at photographing people, whether they were his famous friends like Hemmingway and Picasso, or prisoners of war, the poor and the destitute. One of his portraits is of a French woman holding the baby she had fathered with a German soldier. The sequence of images shows her with her head shaved, and then being jeered as she is paraded through the town. The smiles of the crowd would have been pleasant in almost any other situation, but …

In the Studio

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Here’s a couple of recent studio portraits of Alisa and Tory. Both are building up their modeling portfolios and I wish them both a great deal of future success. It was also my first opportunity to work with the talented makeup artist Summer Martinez. Summer and I will be working on several exciting projects over the next few months so keep this blog bookmarked 🙂