Portraiture

My Adventures in Japan

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I went over to Japan initially for a small trip to work out some paperwork but it turned into being a 4 month trip of creative opportunities. My brother, Jon Levy, recorded an album while I was back home in Japan, and I was recruited as the cameraman. I did all the photography and video work for the album and ended up going to the studio everyday, watching the whole project come together. It was fascinating to witness, and an honor to be the visual historian of the project.

So I'm back in Melbourne, Australia again and l have a lot to share with you guys. Photos and thoughts I haven't released to the world yet! So in the upcoming weeks there will be posts sharing some of my experiences from this latest trip to Japan. Here is the first one for you.

 

The last week I was in Japan, Jon and I did a few photo shoots before I left. In my mind we were celebrating what we'd accomplished in the last couple months as well as preparing ourselves to part ways for a time. One of the photo shoots we did was out in the forest near our childhood home in the mountains of Shiga.

It was a new and different type of shoot for me since it was the first time I used off-camera flashes and took time to mess around with lighting setups. It was a fun time of experimenting with different lighting techniques but it also produced some pretty neat photos. I had two speed lights setup on stands and used some wireless triggers to use them as portable strobes. So I was experimenting with three light sources. The sun, and my two flashes. It was just coming up on dusk when we started the shoot, so I got some really interesting different light throughout the next couple of hours. Here are four of some of my favorite shots. I may upload a few more from this shoot later on.

 

I'm especially proud of the lighting on this one, and the backlight that outlines his left side.

Gold Antiques - A Portrait of Luke Fujii

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Let me tell you the story of how I met my friend Luke. We were 3 years old and I'm in the sand pit pretending to be a dinosaur, when the new kid pounces onto my back. In the process of jumping on top of me he also used my head as a bit of a crutch, resulting in my face suffocating in the sand. I can't recall whether he got tired of drowning me, or if a teacher came along and pulled him off. Luke, my now longtime friend, doesn't recall any of this. Probably because it wasn't traumatising on his end of things. Despite our interesting first interaction with each other, we still ended up being the best of friends.

 

Luke, like myself, grew up as an international kid always in different parts of the world, so it's very rarely we get to see each other. Luckily our schedules have collided and we're currently both back in Japan. Naturally we've met up. While we roamed the city we grew up in, I had my camera in hand taking photos along the way. We wandered down into the depths of an antique shop. Little did we know how awesome the place was. I unfortunately didn't take any photos inside the store but I did get a few on the way down. One of the reasons I love this shot is the lighting. The mix of the warm backlight and the smidgen of natural light from the doorway creates a really interesting contrast between the background and Luke. Not to mention the cool stairway that makes this shot a lot more interesting.

One thing I've always struggled with is color. It usually takes me some time to make my mind up on whether I prefer the monochrome or color versions of a photograph. I guess I couldn't quite decide with the next images so I'll show you both. Let me know which you prefer, color or B/W? Don't forget you can click on the images to see a fullscreen version of each photo.


Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed!

-Daniel Levy