Pic: Donavon Frankenreiter I had a brilliant weekend at the Greenroom Festival in Yokohama. It’s a music festival, based around surf culture. There was a whole lot of amazing artwork including live mural paintings from the Gravity Free crew. These guys are prolific, and James and I will be hooking up with them again to help get their artwork out to the world. The music was a lot of fun, and the floorboards on the huge wooden theatre were literally bouncing with thousands of dancers. Highlights for me were Dachambo, Natty, Rickie-G, Matt Grundy and Donavon Frankenreiter. I got to meet up with Matt and Donavon after 5 years, when I last saw them on their Australian Tour in 2004. It was a reminder that this is a crazy, small world – and I love it. Pic: Me sporting a new headpiece from Tokyo Designers Chaco, with some of my new friends, backstage at the Greenroom Read More
James and I were looking for inspiration for our next article submission, so we jumped on the local train and headed down the coast to Onjuka. We walked from the quite train station, past streets of deserted houses in overgrown yards, to a beach of half white and half black sand. The coastal holiday town was deserted on this windy Sunday afternoon, all except for a few keen surfers who took their longboards out on the completely flat ocean (and I’m not exaggerating. We watched the ocean for about half and hour and not a single ripple came through). Thankfully, we were more successful on our mission than the local surfers, and the change of scenery gave us inspiration for a great photo article….I’ll tell you all about it once it’s been published. Read More
Here are some photos of around where I live, in Ichinomya in Chiba, Japan… I got up at 4:30am to get some sunrise shots on the beach. It was Sunday, and even at sunrise the beach is crowded with surfers – many from Tokyo on their weekend break – quite possibly their one day off each week. Technical: I exposed for the background of this image to silhouette the figures against the back light. By setting the white balance to flash, I enhanced the colour temperature to an even warmer tone than the true early morning light. Black, volcanic sand with tetrapods protecting the land from typhoon swells and tsunamis. People leave their surfboards, bikes and shoes lying around, because nobody steals things in Japan. I love the morning sunlight on this boat. Technical: The hazy atmosphere diffused the sun to soften the warm early-morning sunlight. I shot at a fairly wide-angle to distort the shape of the boat and enhance the surreal feeling of the image. A few of our neighbours, with rice paddies in the foreground. Japanese people tend to have different taste in housing colours, to what I’m used to back in Australia. Pink is a bit […] Read More