Most of the photography here is mine, or is from a class that I’ve taught. This one isn’t that. One of my students went to Italy and came back with this awesome shot. I love it because it’s completely candid – Nowadays in the US, and I’d suspect Japan as well, a shot like this would have to be staged. [...]

I remember the great old neon Dotonbori sign that’s been replaced with the ugly, obnoxious TV. I remember the statue of Atom Boy that used to be in front of Kyoto station. Now, it’s getting to the point where I remember what things in Tokyo used to look like. Last week I got lost because I walked down a street [...]

I happened across a Zeiss 50mm f /1.4 Planar T for a good price a while back, and I bought it with an eye to selling my Nikkor 50mm f/1.2. The gap between 1.2 and 1.4 really isn’t all that much, especially when you take into the consideration how soft the Nikkor is at f/1.2. But the Zeiss is a [...]

It’s getting harder and harder to find things that film does better than digital. One of the things that’s really nice about film is that it doesn’t build up noise on a long exposure like digital does. But as Heller told us, there’s always a catch. It’s not quite the doozy that Catch-22 is, but it’s a big one. One [...]

The Orbis ringflash adapter says what it does, and does what it says. If you’re looking to shoot that shadowless fashion portrait, The Orbis will turn your small strobe into some fantastic light, at the cost of a few stops of light. It’s a fantastic light, and if it was lighter and folded flat, then maybe I’d be leaving my [...]

I used my last roll of Ektachrome VS this week. It was a bittersweet ending to a great film. I have to profess that I did love Ektachrome G more than VS, but the super-saturated Ektachrome VS, the last Kodak slide film that we will ever see, was a whole lot of fun to shoot. As film shooters in the [...]

The Gyoen today was beautiful, but it was a bit of a surprise. It looks like the wind and the rain weren’t any good for the ume, and so the ume had largely been bare of blossoms, or leaves, but the sakura were out, and the mejiro were rather cooperative. I had my D200 out because the added reach of [...]