OGRE in Svartvitt

AntiKnock is a legendary Tokyo venue, like CBGB in NYC but this one is still in action. This place is a dull MF'er to shoot at since the light consist of mainly blue, white and some weird pink/purple. All in spotlight on full or nothing, so you either have something too overexposed or way under if you don't shoot with a flash. I was shooting in B/W without flash through a fixed 50mm to see what could be done about it, turned out half good I think. This band is really heavy and delivers a well aimed punch of strong trash/death metal but in a kind of new wave of NWOAHM, so the B/W works for sure.

I put up some more on the RxKxBx site as well, way way different though....HERE


A friend of mine saw SickOfItAll play here once 15 years ago or something, half time and the organizers had to stop the show, tell everyone to go outside for half an hour so they could get some air pumped down (it's in the basement) so the band could breath and have people stop passing out allover. Around the corner is a small police shack (called "Koban" in Japan...BTWFTP) and they had stopped response to calls from AntiKnock for all the fights. Just let the mayhem continue as long as it wasn't taken up on the streets. Pretty slow nowadays though, guess todays kids just have a too strong emo DNA implanted in their girlish little wannabee fake lifestyles....did I just say that....? So what!

Through a lens

I clearly remembered the feeling of seeing the first digital images when this medium started to come out on the market in publications etc. It was often a flat, cold image with the wrong color balance, full of noise in the wrong places. I do not think that a blurred or grainy photograph is a bad thing, amy times it actually helps bringing out the reality , but when it came to the first digital frames I really saw that this was the new way to completely destroy the beauty of photography. During the years we have come to get use to these "looks" and it has become the norm. Todays sensors and software may have improved on top of that and to pursue the "original" style has become a quest from all major camera makers. I was looking through Annie Leibovitz work from the 80s and they have a clear look of color film photography. Those images were at that time the role model style for most high end publications. If you would try to push these today I guess not many would be to thrilled about them. So, our eyes has changed, our mind set has changed and nothing wrong with that I guess. Like when the first color images came out, most old school type of hardcore photographers disliked it. That's what Philip Jones Griffiths said during a seminar I attended here in Tokyo some years ago. If it was not in B/W it wasn't a worthy photograph! So just to show you my point and again post up older stuff from my stock, I have here below some photos from Asia where as ONE photo is a digital file. Since 35mm has to be, developed, mounted, scanned and downloaded and I am a really lame photoshopper there are some images with visible dust or even hair (or...), part of the process. Can you my fellow man tell me witch this digital photo is? If you are a follower of this blog you might already have seen it and will then see it clearly...or, maybe it isn't as clear as I have come to view it myself?