Aperture, in the simplest terms, is the hole in your camera. No, don’t panic. That hole’s supposed to be there. The ones in the back – where the rubber seals have fallen off the film door – those are a reason to panic. The hole in the front that looks like the beginning of an old-school Bond movie, that one’s [...]

So, a while back, a friend of mine mentioned that his grandfather had passed, and since his passing, his cameras had just sat on a shelf. Now, that right there is a recipe for a sad, lonely camera going unused. Unused cameras can catch a bad case of mold, and die a sad, lonely death. But Toru did the right [...]

In April, Trey Ratcliff gave a tech talk at Google Tokyo, and it was enlightening, and not just because I learned that Trey believes in Hank Rollins’s theory of artist creation. It was interesting to hear about Trey’s post-processing line. We all have one, some line where something stops being a photograph, and starts being some sort of photoshop-generated art. [...]

I did some portraits recently for Sera Goto, a wine growing and wine education specialist here in Tokyo. She heard about me through the grapevine(Sorry. Just because I’m young and not Japanese doesn’t mean I’m not an oyaji!) and we had a great time shooting. She’s got a pretty impressive life story to date, and I can’t wait to see [...]

Was on my way out the door the other day when I ran across this guy – significantly larger and more crab-like than my roommate. He was equally accommodating as far as the photo shoot went, though. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as the setup goes. It’s two Einsteins with shoot-through umbrellas set up 180 degrees apart, and off-axis. [...]

Recently I got together with a group of enterprising individuals and we drove out to Tanukiko, looking for some beautiful sunrise photos of Mt. Fuji. Yeah. Didn’t happen. Sometimes the weather just doesn’t cooperate. We managed to get some other really interesting photos, but this was the most we saw of Fuji all weekend. We did catch one more glimpse [...]

Of the three basic choices, shutter speed is the one that is the easiest to grasp intuitively. The faster the shutter speed is, the darker your picture is.  So where’s the trade-off? Well… what are your goals? Shutter speed controls two very distinct types of blur – camera shake and motion blur. Which, really, are different ways of experiencing the [...]