On Saturday 24th I went to an event called Tokyo Design Festa, held in Tokyo Big Sight, in Odaiba. It’s a huge exhibition. In fact, it’s the biggest exhibition of this kind in all Asia. many artists (painters, designers, mangakas, performers, etc) gathered during that weekend to promote themselves, sell their art, or just perform their music, plays, etc. It was quite interesting. Actually, if you are interested in taking part of this huge event, you can do so next May 15th. You don’t need to be Japanese to be able to take part in this event. You can exhibit your work in many several ways. In fact, it’s quite flexible.

If you are an artist and are interested in showing up, promote yourself and sell your art, you can rent, depending on your pocket, a small stand, a big one, or a medium one. Saturday is cheapper, in any case.

Then you have to add the prize for the electric expense (around 7,000 yens), or the additional exhibitor’s pass if any (1000 for 2 days, 500 for one day). And if you use the Parking, you have to pay as well.

But, don’t worry if you cannot make it for May. You can also use the Design Festa Gallery, located near Harajuku. It’s a quite outstanding and a little bit breath-taking. The building can be easily found thanks to its colors, mainly. It has several rooms that can be rent from 5,250 yen a day to 107,500 yen a whole week. So, yeah, we can say that you have many choices to be able to exhibit there, if that is your wish.

Whatever the case might be, Tokyo Design Festa was quite interesting, plenty of artists and crazy people. I had the chance to enjoy myself taking a look on other people’s art. Just a word: INSPIRING.

Some pictures:

He is Nakai Tomoyasu just an amazing artist. The draw in his back was made by his own hands.

She is selling her own draws

Also big walls.

Almost everything was there.

Pendants made with trash

Peter Rojas – Technology Guru, Founder at gdgt, Engadget and Gizmodo
Marc Alt – Green Visionary, Founder at Marc Alt + Partners
Mark Dytham – Creative Catalyst, Partner at Klein Dytham architecture, and Founder of Pecha Kucha
Rie Azuma – Lifestyle Architect, Azuma Architecture
Danny Choo – Japan Sub-Culture Authority, Mirai Inc., dannychoo.com
Hiromi Matsubara – Green Media Activist, Co-founder, Greenz.jp
Piers Fawkes – Trends Expert, Founder at PSFK (moderator)

Pauline Kee from Nissan on the left picture, she was really nice to talk with and a really smart lady. On the right pic we can see Steve improving his skills with his Sony cam.

Jonny Li on the left picture. He was really happy to have all that Italian wine available for free ^^; on the right picture, we have Mika Ueno playing with her iPhone. As always, she was full of energy.

Danny Choo talking at the event.

Marc Alt, Peter Rojas, and Mark Dytham

Eido Inoue from Google, Danny Choo and Ken Lee

Ken Lee and Eido Inoue

Coming back from the event we found these nice girls just dressing so funny.

I love this kind of events specially for the great mix of people that you can find there. There are IT guys, artists, photographers, journalists, writers, hard beer drinkers, everything. It’s a mix but it’s creative.

Biz Stone talking at the initial presentation.

Danny trying to read from his helmet!

Kohta Awano (@awano) from Tokyo MX

People, people…

Again Biz Stone talking at the final presentation.

Some funny guys getting drunk ^^;

Danny and two special ladies.

Left @tangerinejp and @mikamika59

Finally two shots of Danny and Steve with his new HD Sony cam ^^;

Don’t worry if you aren’t in Tokyo. You have the opportunity to be delighted with Keizo Kitajima both in New York and Tokyo. It’s an photography exhibition about the work and vision of Kitajima during the 1975 to 1991. He had his debut with “BC Street Okinawa” in 1975, then he got the Kitamura prize for his work “New York” in 1983. You can appreciate his shots and his style of this period. It includes the changing of his style while visiting the collapsed Soviet Union in 1991. You shouldn’t miss this opportunity.

You still have time for “the Joy of Portraits” at the Amador Gallery in NY. (around 23 days left). But you should hurry for the exhibit in Tokyo (around 3 days left!!) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

Don’t get stressed because you have also other opportunities to appreciate good works, or even to share your point of view about art at the ICC Open Space 2009 (plenty of time left to experience it). It’s a free communication space opened to the public. You have the chance to appreciate some representative works of media art created not only by Japanese artists, but also masterpieces of international artists. The exhibition has an adding: a new space dedicated to the “Art & Science”.

If you are in Barcelona, I really recommend you “endemoniados” of Ricardo Cinalli. You can enjoy a very impressive collection of masterpieces: sculptures, paintings and compositions dedicated to the curves of the human body. Enjoy it at Galeria Mito, at the Carrer Rosselló. But if you are more found of photography, I recommend you to enjoy the works of the Fundació Foto Colectalia where you can see a great collection of good photos from different artists.

If you happen to be in Paris, you can also enjoy Rencontres Internationales 2009, from November 30th to December 9th, at the Centre Pompidou, by the Théâtre du Châtelet. You can enjoy some films and visual propositions. This cultural and artistic platform, gives us the opportunity not only to enjoy but also to take part into the new cinema and contemporary art. This event takes also part into the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. Check here for more information

A good friend of mine, @iMorpheus, asked me to write about how I took this portrait for his new group created in flickr, check it here.

It was a bar, it was dark, it was crowded, there was smoke in the air and I was sitting in a table, drank a few beers…
At that point the victim (Paul) was just in the right position in front of me and smoking. I had to shot a portrait!
In the bag I had a flash Sigma EF-500, Nikon D200 and a small white sheet plus a TTL cord to detach the flash from the camera to make it movable. @tangerinejp helped me putting the white sheet near Paul’s face, the flash settings were in manual at minimum power 1/64. The camera settings were f/3.2, 1/250, ISO 100 and white balance in flash mode. The rest of the job corresponds to the model, he really played the role and that’s one of the most important things. That’s why although the conditions might be bad or the equipment might be poor, if the model knows how to behave in front of the camera, and knows how to transmit a feeling, the rest is just a right shot!

Here we have @tangerinejp posing as an innocent kitten ^^;

The entire set.

To be or not to be professional, that’s the question!

Photography is an art, and as an art it expresses a message and feelings, that not always have to be understood by all of us. It can happen that they won’t be understood in the way that the photographer himself felt and saw in the moment he took his shot. To talk about professionalism into the art world is a nonsense. Having a title doesn’t mean that you are qualified to be an artist. Besides, it is absurd to talk about “better” or “worse” photographer. Even talking about “better” or “worse” is absurd. Each masterpiece it is so, and each person feels it in a different way. It is the mystery of art, the beauty of it, the special thing about it, the uniqueness that cannot be cataloged or classified, nor indexed, nor fit into the words of “professionalism”.

So, what is the difference between a professional photographer and an amateur one?

If you care so much about that differentiation, please take a look to a photo of each of those supposed-existing categories. Then choose the one that makes you feel more, the one that transmits you more. That one will be the photo of “your” professional. Happy? In this way we have a professional, a person whose photos we can fell are “good” ones.

Can you grasp the absurdity of it? Let’s make another experiment. Put two photos one beside another one. One from a photographer with more than 10 years of experience, and another one from a beginner that has just bought a reflex.

Could you tell me which one is the “professional”?

If we enter into the technical parameters like illumination, sharpness, etc, we can determine who of the two knows more about theory and technical parameters. But if we talk about art, the truth is that those have no meaning. Even the years of experience have no meaning. It only matters which of the two photos is transmitting you a feeling, which one is making you see something beyond the mere image. Be careful because this only happens into our minds, our souls, and it may happen that the person beside you that is looking at the same pictures, thinks that the other photo is the one that transmits more feelings, or even that person can tell you that none of them are artistic.

For that reason we cannot allow this “to be or not to be” to darken and influence our sensitivity when we are appreciating a photo.

Personally I think that a professional is that person that can make, in the best way possible and with the less amount of errors, something that can be defined as “correct” or not. For example, in a wedding, an amateur photographer will hardly obtain the same results as one that has been covering weddings for several years. Here the experience influences. But, beware! The experience doesn’t influence in artistic terms. The experience influences the technical terms. Do you think that to shot a wedding is easy? It’s not! The strength you need during several hours carrying all the equipment, to ignore the sweat, to be uncomfortable or the difficulty of the poses that you have to do to be able to take the shoot, while you try to avoid obstacles and hundreds of other parameters to be able to shoot the moment. Time is running against you, and a second before or after will determine the whole in a wedding. To be able to treat people correctly, to know how to relax the main characters of this event to be able to take part of the photographic game. You have to be able to turn normal people into models for some hours. To be able to achieve this you need experience and professionalism.

In other words, we shouldn’t mistake the words. To be a professional doesn’t mean to be a “better” artist. To be a professional implies that you know how to act efficiently and without errors in a certain landscape, in which its nature dictates the rules that might be followed. Weddings, models, war documentaries, mass media, publicity, etc. You cannot learn it into the books, only with time.

Every professional can be an artist, but not every artist has to be a professional.

HOUVA web Page

Artists:

Doppel ドッペル
Houxo Que ホウコォ キュウ
Mustone マストワン

Some pictures of the event:

A Photographer in action.

These are the latest pics I took to it and they got modified with Pixelmator.
I will talk about this wonderful application. Of course it’s not at the same level as photoshop but it’s really powerful for a reasonable price. I just applied a simple filter after post process it in Lightroom

After apply Edge filter on Pixelmator, increase exposure and change colors to green. I like the effect. I’ll use this filter for many other pics I had, the effect is quite impressive.

It’s amazing the level of details. They built every aspect of Gundam.
Japanese are so good to reproduce until the minimum detail.

The whole set of Gundam pictures here

Previous post about it.

This is the last post I’ll talk about it, I promise (maybe…) I hope they repeat this again, nowadays materials and technology provides us with the tools and skills to reproduce big sized objects with a great detailed level and people love that kind of things!

All the posts have been moved and all comments are there. Just add to your feeds the “new” blog.
In fact it’s not really new. It’s the response to the rules and laws of the blog universe: Don’t mix, focus on your niche.

Actually some categories have few posts, some of them just only one. I have a lot of photographs to upload and comment, it’s a never ending task and that’s one of the reasons I love it so much.
Creativity has no limits.