Our man in Tokyo: July 2007 Archives

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July 21, 2007

Better flickr

For those flickr addicts out there, here's a great new plug-in for Firefox. Called Better flickr, it adds a whole lot of new functionality to the photo-sharing site and makes it easier to explore people's photos, as well as to get information about who likes your own pictures. Features include 'Leech', which sucks in all of the photos from a particular user, date or group and displays them all simultaneously (no need for clicking through dozens of pages to get to a particular photo) and 'Scout', which takes you to all of a user's photos which have made it to flickr's explore pages. All of this is very handy for sorting through thousands of photos and quickly finding somebody's best work.

Then there's the ability to select what size of photo you want to view from a person's profile page - great if there's a larger jpg available. Although this feature was there before, a new drop-down menu makes choosing different sizes much faster.

Overall, its a handy plug-in for Firefox and well worth downloading.

Posted by Marcus at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Watermarking

Like everyone else, I'm sometimes in too much of a hurry to post my photos here on the blog or to flickr. If its something that I really like, something I want to share with other people, then I'll skip things like rating the rest of the photos from an import, resizing things correctly or adding watermarks.

Well, it turns out there's a reason you shouldn't skip parts of the workflow. The past few weeks, I've been noticing quite a few of my photos showing up elsewhere on the web... like here, here and here.

Now I'm not particularly worried if people want to use my images on their sites. In fact, I think its kinda flattering. But if you are going to use a picture from somebody's personal site, its always a good idea to ask if its ok first, or to add a link to the photographer's website. At least the people above linked back to my site. There must be dozens of sites out there which don't, and which I'll probably never know about.

For photographers, this illustrates the importance of watermarking and copyright notices. No matter how much you want to upload that photo NOW, its better to be patient and add watermarks to your images. Otherwise you never know just where your photos will turn up!

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July 16, 2007

Will it blend: iPhone

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July 14, 2007

Reichstag, Berlin

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July 13, 2007

Dingo

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July 11, 2007

Harajuku

For the past couple of weeks I've been making the short journey to Harajuku to take photos. Part circus, part zoo, Harajuku is synonomous with Japanese youth culture. Every Sunday, young Japanese (and increasingly, young foreigners) descend on the area around the station to pose for the ever-growing throngs of tourists, as well as the occasional dodgy-looking oyaji - grinning old men with camera vests and high-powered cameras.

Although the cosplay kids are the main attraction, I'm not sure how I feel about joining the paparazzi-like photographers to take pictures. The hundreds of mostly American and Chinese tourists approach their subjects as though on safari. Everywhere there are long lenses and shouts of "Oh look at that one!" and "Quick! Get a picture". I have to admit that I've taken my fair share of candid photos around the station, but I usually try to at least talk with the person I want to photograph before firing away.

Of course, asking people on the street to pose for photographs takes a bit of getting used to. Strangely enough, I find I get a better response when I speak to the kids around the station when I speak to them in English rather than Japanese. It seems they are happier posing for tourists than people who live in here. In any case, I'm pretty happy with the way my portraits have been turning out and I'm hoping to spend some more time shooting the cosplay kids in the coming weeks.

I'm also planning to take more photos of the bands performing in nearby Yoyogi Park. One of the downsides of living in Tokyo is that the live music scene is basically confined to nightclubs (dance & hip hop) and a handful of 'live houses' - usually small bars where people can go and watch small up-and-coming bands. Unless you want to go and see J-pop acts like SMAP or Ayumi Hamasaki, you have few options.

Not far from the cosplay action is the sprawling Yoyogi Park, an island of green in the center of Tokyo. On the weekends, bands line the side of the park to play to tourists and passers-by. Its one of the only places where new bands can go to get some experience playing to an audience. Some of the groups playing in the park have real talent. Others make you wonder whether the lack of live venues is really a bad thing. All of the bands playing in the park love performing and play with incredible energy. This makes Yoyogi a great place to take pictures. Sure the light is bad (the trees block the sun) and the background awful (mostly cars, signs or concrete barriers) but even blurry shots like the one above give you some idea of the how much fun it is to be there.

Our man in Tokyo