Jim O’Connell Photographs, The Blog.

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

I got an email today from someone asking about portrait lenses.

Looking at her Flickr stream, she seemed to be using a Nikon D-80, which is a DSLR with a cropped sensor, so my answer leans a bit towards users of those cameras. For a long time, I used a Nikon D-100, which has a similar sensor.

Basically, the most important factor in a good portrait is not the lens or the camera that you use, but the level of connection and intimacy you can create between your subject and the viewer.

She asked for a recommendation for a prime lens, but in the end, it wasn’t my first suggestion. Shooting with primes is great, but it can be a lot of work. If you’re shooting a few hundred frames in a session, this can lead to a lot of pictures that look quite a lot alike. Getting something good in a short amount of time often requires a lot of different compositions.

In general, I despise most discussions about gear. No matter how much you try to speak in very general terms, someone will undoubtedly chime in to argue that the new Smegron 3-1500mm f:13.5 zoom that they heard will be announced at Photokina two years from now is the obvious best choice for portraits. These things are a matter of taste, which is really impossible to quantify. For example, one of my favorite portraits ever is one of the painter Francis Bacon, shot by John Deakin. I like it because it’s raw and unflattering, shot in close with a wide lens. In effect, he did it wrong and it works astoundingly well because of it.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote to her, perhaps some of you may find it useful as well:

Hi -

It depends a bit on the camera you use. If you are using a camera with a cropped sensor, like most of the digital SLRs on the market, you may find some of the more traditional portrait lenses to be a bit tight in composition. Still, if you like a close-cropped face in the portrait, something like an 85mm lens is still a good choice with a lot of flexibility. The 85 is a classic portrait lens for 35mm film photography. Being a slightly telephoto lens, it adds a bit of compression to the features of the subject, which is very often flattering. Wider lenses, especially those below 35mm, can be a bit unflattering, at the extreme making the subject appear moon-faced.

The kind of telephoto compression to which I refer is the effect you may have seen with a long telephoto lens, say a view down a crowded street from far away where the people appear almost stacked upon each other. When you read about lens equivalents with cropped sensors, they may say something to the effect of “a 50mm lens becomes an 80mm lens” but this is deceptive. A lens with a 50mm focal length will not have the telephoto compression of an 80mm lens, so you can’t expect the little bit of flattering that you’d get with an 80 or 85 millimeter lens.

That said, a 50mm lens is capable of taking excellent portraits, on any DSLR, regardless of sensor. You just need to get up and move your feet to do your composing. The same with an 85mm lens. It’s a lot of work to shoot a dynamic portrait session with a prime lens, but the benefits can be worth the effort. With any prime, you’re going to get good optics and a wider maximum aperture than on most zoom lenses. The wider the aperture, the more control you have over “bokeh” or out-of-focus blur, which can be good for isolating your subject from a distracting background. Wider apertures also let more light into the camera, allowing you to not only shoot in lower light, they help autofocus do it’s thing better and faster.

So for a good prime, I’d recommend getting the fastest 50mm prime you can justify getting. A 50mm f:1.8 can be had for between $80 and $120. That’s a simply fantastic price for a lens that fast. A bit faster f:1.4 will run you about $300. Canon makes a f:1.2, but it costs about $1,500. I have one of these and while it’s a real beauty, it’s a beast as well. It weighs a heck of a lot more than the others, which is a real consideration when shooting all day. I shot a model in my little studio the other day using that lens and others and after a couple of hours, my shoulders were simply aching. Still, the simply creamy blur it makes in out of focus areas makes it worth the pain—sometimes.

But you know what? If I had one lens to use for a portrait session where there’s be a lot of different poses and styles, where I need a lot of flexibility in composition, I honestly wouldn’t be shooting with a prime. For one thing, I often work in small spaces—my studio in Tokyo is about the size of a 1-car garage. Other times, shooting dancers, I’ll be on stage with them, with not a lot of space to move around.

In these cases, I use a zoom. On Canon, I like the 24-70 f:2.8 L zoom and on Nikon, I like the 28-70 f:2.8.

Both lenses are real workhorses. F:2.8 is about the fastest you can get in a zoom and they are pretty expensive and heavy, but I find them to be a good trade-off between price, weight and performance.

First, I’d take a good look at the lenses you own now. Even the “kit lenses” that come as an option for most DSLRs are often great, flexible lenses for portraits. After all, the makers know that a good percentage of new users will be soon taking their cameras to weddings or pointing them at newborn babies, so I suspect they optimize for those situations. In that case, you might best improve your portraits by getting a good flash with a diffuser or working on your composition. Get on your feet and engage your subject—your portraits will improve.

Shooting in your camera’s RAW mode makes a big difference as well. With that, you can go back and make subtle corrections to lighting and white balance, which is crucial for getting good skin tones.

Still, if you want a good prime, I’d try out a good 50mm. They’re just too much of a good value to pass up.

Good luck!

Jim

In Japan, traditionally the days also have religious names and meanings. Some days are considered either good or bad for things like weddings and funerals, while other times and days might be good for things like scheduling a job interview or a school exam. I’ve seen them marked on Japanese printed calendars, but never paid much attention to them. In a way, they’re similar to the Christian customs of not eating meat on Friday or being cautious on Friday the Thirteenth.

I’m just learning about these, so I thought it might be handy to have them as a calendar in my iCal program and on my iPod:

To make this, I started with the calendar found here:

http://www002.upp.so-net.ne.jp/yama3/topics/topicsindex.html

I downloaded it and did a series of search and replaces to add not just the romaji version, but a short description from Wikipedia. If you read Japanese and don’t need the English, you should probably just subscribe to the original

Here’s what Wikipedia says about them:

Rokuyō

The rokuyō (六曜) are a series of six days that supposedly predict whether there will be good or bad fortune during that day. The rokuyō are still commonly found on Japanese calendars and are often used to plan weddings and funerals, though most people ignore them in ordinary life. The rokuyō are also known as the rokki (六輝). In order, they are:

Kanji Romanization Meaning

先勝 Senshō Good luck before noon, bad luck after noon. Good day for beginnings (in the morning).

友引 Tomobiki Bad things will happen to your friends. Funerals avoided on this day (tomo = friend, biki = pull, thus a funeral might pull friends toward the deceased). Typically crematoriums are closed this day.

先負 Senbu Bad luck before noon, good luck after noon.

仏滅 Butsumetsu Symbolizes the day Buddha died. Considered the most unlucky day. Weddings are best avoided. Some Shinto shrines close their offices on this day.

大安 Taian The most lucky day. Good day for weddings and events like shop openings.

赤口 Shakkō The hour of the horse (11 am - 1 pm) is lucky. The rest is bad luck.

The rokuyō days are easily calculated from the Japanese Lunisolar calendar. Lunisolar January 1 is always senshō, with the days following in the order given above until the end of the month. Thus, January 2 is tomobiki, January 3 is senbu, and so on. Lunisolar February 1st restarts the sequence at tomobiki. Lunisolar March 1st restarts at senbu, and so on for each month. The last six months repeat the patterns of the first six, so July 1 = senshō, December 1st is shakkō and the moon-viewing day of “August 15th” is always a “butsumetsu.”

This system did not become popular in Japan until the end of the Edo period.

Subscribe to iCal 六曜カレンダー

Today, I spent the afternoon shooting in Ginza. The street that runs along the side of Mitsukoshi, where the Apple store sits, is a broad, East-West avenue that they close to traffic on weekends.

Ginza Arrows is what I call one set I made, using the traffic markings on the street:

I’m loathe to admit it, but I’m a bit of a regular in the Japan section of Yahoo Answers. It started as a way to pass the time when I was having bad insomnia, but grew into a habit. I’d wake up at three or four in the morning and have a few hours before dawn to kill, so I would answer questions that people asked about moving here or visiting, immigration procedures, customs, food, whatever.

In the Japan group, you get questions from people of all ages, kids wanting some fact for an assignment, people wondering if they will be able to survive here if they’re vegetarians, people who live here and are looking for a place to get some special thing from back home. Most of the questions are pretty basic, the kind of stuff that they could figure out themselves if the had ever heard of Google, but many people want to have a real person answer their question specifically. It’s not a bad way to kill some time, actually.

A few times a day, you get really annoying questions though. People who ask over and over how much a quantity of dollars is worth in yen, or in some cases, they ask about a German pop group called “Tokio Hotel.”

Tokio Hotel is one of those bands that young teenagers listen to, all hair and makeup, led by a pair of german boys called the Kaulitz Twins, who are, according to their fans “the greatest living musical geniuses” and “the best band evarr.”

While I would never deny a young girl her right to have a crush on a boy band, they have absolutely nothing to do with Japan. Their fans, however, often think it best to spurt their enthusiasm in the Japan group, so in one case, I decided to have a bit of fun. The question, (if you could call it that,) came in the form of a very short, very vague few words:

Iron Maiden VS Tokio Hotel?

I decided to delve into it a bit. I’m no Iron Maiden fan, but I’ve certainly heard of them, so I fired up Wikipedia and a few of their fan sites, to see who they were and what might happen if they were pitted against the boys of “Tokio Hotel.” Here’s what I came up with:

Fascinating question!

It comes down to the classic conflict between youth and age. “Tokio Hotel” are young, so that could be an advantage, since the current lineup of Iron Maiden are basically really old. Dave Murray is about 52 and has pretty skinny arms, but I think he could easily take out Bill and Tom Kaulitz, probably with little effort, since they are basically built like a couple of 12 year old girls.

Nicko McBrain is even older, 56, but the guy is a total badass and could make the members of Tokio Hotel cry, just by making a scary face at them. If he actually shouted, they’d pee themselves. The thing is, McBrain became a Christian in 1999 and wouldn’t do such a thing to a group so weak and helpless as T.H.

Bruce Dickinson (now 50) used to be pretty messed up, but he got disgusted with himself after drunkenly eating leftovers from random trays in, get this, a Tokyo hotel (no lie) that he cleaned up his act, became a jet pilot and recently rescued 200 people stranded in Egypt, not to be confused with the time he flew a 747 full of soldiers out of Afghanistan.

Believe me: You Do Not Want To Mess With This Guy.

So, I think it would be no contest. To win any battle, you need to take out the leaders and that’s definitely Tokio Hotel’s weakest point.

The Kaulitz twins wear wigs, makeup and nail polish and exist only to tap into the lucrative demographic of gender-confused young people.

If you eliminated the Kaulitz Twins, there’d be no band. (Nobody cares about the other two guys or even knows their names.)

Iron Maiden, on the other hand, has shown their ability to survive any change. They’ve had at least ten members, including five different lead singers. They had hits that were already oldies when the members of Tokio Hotel were in diapers. You just can’t kill Iron Maiden.

Tokio Hotel, on the other hand are one bad hair day away from falling apart as a band. Even though I just watched a video of theirs on YouTube moments ago, I can’t remember anything about it, except thinking that they must be idiots to leap *up* when jumping from a helicopter.

In five years, nobody will admit to ever having been into Tokio Hotel, while Iron Maiden is still as amazing as ever after 32 years.

So, if it came down to it and they actually did get together to fight, Iron Maiden would crush Tokio Hotel into the worthless little heap of weeping little boys that they are.

By the way, your question has nothing to do with this section of Yahoo! Answers.

I wish I had never heard of this band, but since people keep talking about them here, unfortunately I do.