Jim O’Connell Photographs, The Blog.

LOHAS, or Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, is a movement wherein people take a careful look at how they live and the impact their existence has upon the planet. Here in the urban sprawl of Tokyo, it’s alive and growing, with shops catering to consumers with a heightened sense of responsibility for their actions.

When a possible client for my photography asked for LOHAS-related images, I realized it was one area somewhat under-represented in my portfolio, so I set off today by bicycle, (appropriately enough, I suppose,) to explore Shimokitazawa, a Western suburb of Tokyo, looking for LOHAS.

As the day wound down, I found myself at the Nong-min Café and spoke to its owner, Mr. Waki, who graciously allowed me to take some photos.

In the garden behind the café, there was a small herb garden, just a couple of square meters, that supplies the shop with fresh herbs.

Written on the stick is “Italian Parsely”.

I spoke with Mr. Waki, the proprietor. He told me about the shop’s two rice paddies outside the city and gave me a tour of the shop.

The first floor café is cool and casual.

Inside a cabinet, the glass teapots and handmade bowls await customers’ orders.

An organic cotton t-shirt proclaims “No Chemicals”.

The shop’s brand includes t-shirts, as well as workwear.

The second floor has two café rooms and an adjoining workroom, complete with sewing machine.

A wooden Buddha sits overlooking the tables in a peaceful customer area.

A cotton boll, a reminder of the connection between the goods in the shop and their natural origins.

An un-dyed organic cotton t-shirt on display.

Herbs grow in pots alongside chalkboards announcing the day’s specials.

Veggies.

The delights from these food emporiums aren’t the sort of meals you serve up on a first date, nor are they the sort of places you eat at every day (unless you have a very good cardiologist). They’re guilty pleasures to be savored, food shared amongst trusted friends and select initiates in a ritual of indiscretion and indulgence; saying “let’s go grab a bag of sliders” is much the same as saying “let’s be bad” with a devilish glint in your eye.

Magnesium Photos» Magnesium Photos.

Photos I shot in Kawagoe for the New York Times:
The Tokyo of Yore - The New York Times > Travel > Slide Show > Slide 1 of 12


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Here’s another slideshow of takes and out-takes from my Hokkaido assignment for the NYT:

Another new set of photos today from the piece I did in Hokkaido recently. There’s the article, as well as a slideshow of a dozen photos. Came out pretty nice, I think.

[From In Japan, a House of Steel - NYTimes.com]

Here’s another NYT assignment I did on Toyo Ito, an architect that’s been getting a lot of attention lately:
Inside the Exteriors of the Architect Toyo Ito - NYTimes.com

(Click the photo to open the slideshow, then look for the navigation buttons at the bottom of the slideshow.)

That was a fun shoot. It was the day after I had done the shoot for the Nakagin Capsule Tower and when I got home from that job, I had an email asking me to shoot Mr. Ito at his office in Aoyama.
We talked about the Nakagin Tower a bit and he told me how its architect, Kisho Kurokawa, had been an inspiration and an influence on all young architects of the time.

Mr. Ito was a warm and friendly man, stylish without being fussy and happy to talk about his work.

When I asked him how he came up with the idea for the opera house, he picked up an object that looked like a CD case and pulled the two pieces of plexiglass apart. Sandwiched between the two pieces was a sheet of flexible woven fabric, held to the two sheets with translucent fasteners. As he pulled it, the fabric was stretched into gentle curves, the same as you can see in the building. (Photos of him holding the model start at slide 52 in the presentation.)

To light the shoot, I used a single strobe, with a Gary Fong Lightsphere, a soft plastic attachment that looks a bit like some sort of Tupperware bowl. I always get comments on it and often feel self conscious when carrying it, but it does a fantastic job. I did some of them with a cable, allowing me to shoot with the flash off-camera, but in all honesty, I coule have skipped that and just shot it all on-camera.

A while back I did a shoot for the NYT on coffee in Tokyo.

Of course I shot far more photos than they actually used in the piece, so I decided to make a slideshow of the best ones that I took, so you can see them here:

(To play the slideshow, use the little buttons below the photo.)

Coffee photos

If you are interested in seeing things that I’ve had published in the NYT and elsewhere, you can follow my “Delicious” links for my tearsheet tag:

http://delicious.com/jim/tearsheet

Delicious.com is a public bookmark site that lets you share links to things you find interesting. You can follow all of the things that I save there, or just certain tags, which are keywords that I’ve applied to the links:

http://delicious.com/jim/

The funny thing is, since the New York Times is completely unavailable in Tokyo, the above snapshot is the closest I’ve come to seeing my photos in actual print.

My first picture published in  the New York Times, right there on the cover:

Here’s the article, where it will live on the site.
You can also download it as a PDF.

I just wrote a reply over on Lightstalkers to a young photographer of eighteen, asking about what it takes to be a working photographer, The comment before mine brought up the subject of beards, so I started with that:

The beard is a must if you decide to pursue landscape photography. For that it should be big, bushy and unkempt.

Grizzled and stubbly is good for many other types of photographers, but be prepared to fill it out on a few weeks’ notice if you do the type of photography which will take you to places where being clean-shaven carries as much credibility as wearing a frilly pink dress.

Just kidding, of course—JR’s comment above made me smile.

As a photographer, be sure you have an absolute handle on the technical aspects of photography. You’ll need to be proficient, to the point where you can produce a well-exposed, well-composed and well-focused shot whenever you are called upon to produce one. Learn to prepare yourself and your gear. For me, it’s stepping off the train, I have a personal ritual of checking that the ISO on my camera is suitable. (checking that it’s not still on ISO 800 from the night before when I’ll be shooting in the daylight.) After that, I check that autofocus is set and that exposure compensation isn’t dialed two stops in the wrong direction and that my battery isn’t about to die. (That’s also when I pull a piece of gaffer tape from the sharpie pen I’ve wound it around and tape my 5D’s power switch on, because it’s in an easy position to get bumped to off, most likely at the worst possible time.)

Kind of a pre-flight check, but the thing is, I do this not even when I’m “shooting,” but all the time. I always have some sort of camera with me, so I give it a once over, generally as I leave the house and look at the light or step off the train. Doorways, I guess, are my trigger.

When I was teaching myself light, I used to carry an incident meter and meter everything, in much the same way. The thing is, you’ve got to have your camera ready at all times. You don’t want to lose a shot that you’re expected to take, because of something stupid like a full roll of film or a memory card you forgot to format.

Next, master the “straight shot” – a picture devoid of artistic tricks and arty overtones. Unless you have a quite unusual editor or a lot of personal clout, it’s better to not shoot your work pictures on a fisheye Holga using cross-processed expired film.

After that, when you’re comfortable taking a competent shot on ten seconds notice, start to think about how you can take a better shot. How can you add something that you see and no one else sees, something profound and inspired. Having studied music, this is something I think of as “virtuosity.”

While the world has hundreds of perfectly competent musical performers, to get to First Chair, you need virtuosity, a term that has it’s roots in the concept of being touched by God. This is the thing that tells you that the violin piece you’re hearing for the first time must be done by Jascha Heifetz, or that the photo you’re seeing for the first time could only have been done by Diane Arbus.

When you have that, it doesn’t matter what you shoot, because everything you choose to shoot will matter. This comes through being relentlessly demanding of yourself and editing your stuff with a cold, unbiased eye.

Of course, orchestras are filled with musicians who will never be first chair, musicians who are fine technicians and probably have comfortable, enjoyable lives, doing what they love to do and there are just as many photographers doing the same. Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t recommend striving for that when you’re eighteen. Dream big.

Most of the world’s significant images were made by people with cameras not as advanced as whatever you probably carry and captured in less than a sixtieth of a second, often by people your age.

Go read about John Filo and his Kent State photo:

http://edition.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/2000/5/4/filo/

Here’s a guy about your age, who reflexively shot something he found mildly interesting and not only won a Pulitzer, but helped bring the end of the Viet Nam war, without going more than a couple of hours from his home in a small Pennsylvania town.

(Plus, he did it with a Nikkormat, half a roll of Tri-X and probably a 50mm Nikkor lens, a setup that would probably cost you $50 today in decent shape used. I don’t like gear discussions, but I find something joyful about that.)

OK – I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent and ranted too much, but good luck to you. Wherever you wind up, you’ll want a solid body of work to open doors and show people that you can do what they need you to do. After that, keep looking for those three or five photos that will define your career and make you live forever.

by Jim O’Connell | 15 Mar 2009 11:03 | Tokyo, Japan