Requirements

I’m looking for beginners or amateur models that would love to pose in front of a camera. Age (+18), Ethnicity, Language and Gender are not a problem. Professionals are also welcome but please read about the payment and benefits at the end.
If you want to learn how to pose or you want to get used to be in front of a camera, I will love to help you in this process as well.

What kind of photography?

I’m not fixed with a concrete style. I like creativity and I love to hear from you, about your ideas as well. This is not a lonely-photographer game. This is a team work, the photographer and the model are a combo, that work together to express in the photography their feelings and their creativity. If you desire to play a particular role, to dress in a particular way or if you always dreamed about posing for a concrete kind of pictures, just let me know. I will love to listen about your project and work together to achieve it.
If you lack of ideas, don’t worry I have a lot of them :)
The kind of photography I’m looking for is:

• Portraits
• Fashion
• Make up
• Urban
• Cosplay
• Art nude (Check details at the end of this post)

Payment and benefits

I prefer to avoid to use money, so I won’t pay you with money. Anyway I don’t discard this possibility, so drop me a line and let’s discuss about this.

I’m actually asking for a collaboration where we both have a benefit.

Common benefits and agreements:

• I will give you the pictures, printed or in a CD or any other medium that you prefer. Of course in full resolution. This is also called: TFCD/P (time for CD/Print)
• The pictures will have a small watermark, linking to this site in the bottom.
• You are totally free to use those pictures for your own book, blog, web site, whatever.
• In a normal photoshot I can shot hundreds of pictures. I will reserve to myself the right to choose and edit the final ones that I will deliver to you. I never upload full resolution pictures in this web site but of course I will give you the full resolution ones in the CD.
• If you have a blog or online book, I will link you from this blog helping you to promote your name and your site. I’ll do this from this blog, from flickr, from twitter and from facebook.
• I we do a good job, I will recommend you to other photographers that are interested in finding models.
• We can also be friends :-)
• If you want to learn how to pose and get used to be in front of a camera, I will help you in this process.
• You have to agree that your pictures will be posted in this web site and my portfolio.

Art nude details

Models have to be more than 18 years old.
Only females, sorry guys…
For nude photography I focus only in the artistic aspect.

You can contact me in many ways:

twitter
facebook
Flickr
Drop me a comment and fill the e-mail text field, it won’t be shown in the site

Thank you for your comments on Flickr and feed back!

This was the year of friendship. After living almost 4 years in Japan this year I had the opportunity to increase the number of friends, and specially people that I can trust. That is the most important achievement for this year and the most valuable thing that anybody could ever desire.
So I want to dedicate this 2009 to the friendship and the real interaction that has a value in this life: the human-to-human open, simple and sincere relationship.

This was also the year of the social networking. I’ve been always an active participant of almost all social platforms out there, but for some reason this year was the most active in these platforms. The value of the social aspect of Internet still is not well understood by many users and companies.
2009 is my social year from all points of view. The evolution of social networking already reached a special momentum that changed the traditional and wrong vision of “Internet human interaction will make you an antisocial” to the more realistic one “If you get into social net, your physical social live will increase as well”

Twitter, facebook, flickr, posteorus and all other platforms that share a similar philosophy are making possible to share my life as a stream of events. Don’t think about it as a loose of privacy. I share what I want to share and that’s the point, the constant daily training myself in the action of sharing knowledge, experiences, ideas, photos, thoughts, simple actions, everything. It’s a streaming of information that gets feed-backed by followers that are doing the same. This will have a huge impact in the near future, especially by the fact that the way to use social networking is evolving beyond our imagination.

This was also a year full of events and a good opportunity to meet new people and see how many communities in Tokyo are increasing in size really quickly. The social aspect is complicated in Japan due to the close nature of its culture. But that is changing, and over this year I could see how the number of Japanese participants increased beyond expectations which is really good!
I also joined the Tokyo Live Bloggers which is a nice initiative of my friend Danny to merge the daily life of bloggers living in the Tokyo area.

Check on their web sites. If you are in the Tokyo area next year, I hope to see you around :)

Tokyo 2.0
Tokyo CGM Night
TLUG Tokyo Linux Users Group
Tokyo OpenSolaris Community
Startup Weekend Tokyo

Photography!! That thing this blog talks about. This was the year that this blog moved completely to photography, art, design and everything related to this wonderful world of colors, lights and cameras. There is still a lot of work to do and many things will be online for the next year. The opportunity to express myself through images and what I see everyday is the way I find my peace in mind and happiness. Every time I go to a photowalk looking for something that will bow my mind back to some timeless moment that deserve to be recorded, is a refreshing opportunity to thank the existence of a world like this, and to remember us the huge importance that this planet represents for our life and future.

This year I had, not for the first time, the opportunity to confirm again that quality is expensive and sometimes it’s necessary to do invert resources to achieve a better result. I’m talking about purchases, products that can make our life easier or harder. Akihabara is a wonderful place for a tech geek and the perfect place to find tons of products for a reasonable price, sometimes extremely cheap ones. Starting in 2006, I accumulated a huge amount of servers, pcmcia cards, cheap notebooks, and a lot of electronic junk that later became really painful to live with, specially because Tokyo’s houses are really small. So I decided to spend in quality and get rid of all the useless material. It was a painful process, you can check here how I dismantled one Sun E-250 and it was just one of them. In Tokyo the regulations for the trash are really strict, so never buy a server that you will not use. Even if it’s extremely cheap and powerful.

The star of my purchases for this year was my iPhone 3GS! I cannot regret anything about it! It’s a wonderful mobile device and actually I cannot find any other device with similar capabilities. I hope to see soon some competitors. The iPhone gives me the possibility to be constantly online with all my networks, webs, feeds, email, blogs, followers, comments, messages, pictures, everything. It’s the Swiss knife of any person that wants to have a social networked life. It’s a little more expensive than other phones, but it is worth paying that money. Here you can read the reason I switched to the iPhone and I don’t want to change :)

Anyway if you have the opportunity to find a Gundam scale 1:1 for a reasonable price, don’t think twice and take it!! Maybe it will be hard to bring it to home, but you can always try to live inside of it :)

I learned that the amount of people living around have no relationship with the feeling of loneliness. Even surrounded by millions of people in a huge city like Tokyo, you can feel really alone. Find the right people to share our life is more important than any material possession.

Tokyo is an amazing city and I will stay here the next year for sure and I think that many others. I have no plans for the future and what I learned this year is that a plan for the future is useful and can give you a guide in the path. But forcing yourself to follow it is a big mistake. Let it be, do the path instead of following the path that maybe others suggested you to do. Listen to people, learn from the mistakes of others but, at the same time, follow your heart, even if everybody around you tells you that it’s a mistake. If it comes from the deepest part of your soul, you have to do it!!

I want to say thank you to the people that, in a way or in another, are giving me their support, advices, suggestions and constructive critics. Thank you all of you for your help, thank you to be there and thank you to stay together the next year also. Some of you are far away and some just a couple of stations from my home, but it doesn’t matter, the link is the important thing, and to keep that link stronger every year.

Recomendations for the 2010:

Alvaro Correal, David Santo Orcero, Jose Maria Atencia and José Moreno
You guys are far far away from here, but the distance doesn’t make any difference. I know it’s a unbreakable link :)
Alvaro I hope you don’t work so much for the 2010, please!!
David 頑張って！ I know you can achieve your plans for the next year.
Jose Maria don’t forget your talent for the design!
José Moreno I hope that your reborn in Photography doesn’t disappear again! :)

Jim Grisanzio You are a working machine and one of the best communicators I know. Take care for the 2010 and let it be :) @jimgris

Steve Nagata if you are now the mayor of Akihabara, I hope you to be the president for the 2010! :) Thank you for your advices and support. I hope you the best for the 2010! @stevenagata

Paul Papadimitriou I was lucky to meet you this year my friend. I hope to see you soon. Don’t forget that you have a second home here! @papadimitriou

Danny Choo You are a constant source of inspiration. Take care for the next 2010 and please at least one day let me go to the Death Star! :) @dannychoo

Jonny Li Hey matey! :) 頑張って頑張ってand頑張って for the 2010! You have all my support and help! @jonnyli

Oren! I hope you can finally paint the whole World in RED! I’m sure you will! :) @Oren_The_Red

Derek Your photos are a source of inspiration, you are my Black and White master! @iMorpheus

Setsuko Harada It was so good to meet you! I hope you the best for the 2010 and 頑張って！@ami_harikoshi

Ramón I hope to see you soon the next year and you enjoy in your next adventure. @bapho

Francesco Fondi You always make me feel I’m in Italy again. Felice 2010 e in bocca al lupo! @FrankieBit

Kyle Hasegawa You can find him at any IT event in Tokyo :) @KyleHase

Andrew Shuttleworth Thanks for organizing such amazing events!! @ashuttleworth

Philippe Valdois Next year for sure that beers in Shibuya!! S&F! @pvaldois

Gohsuke Takama Next will be better I’m sure! My best wishes! @gohsuket

Dean Fujii Thanks for your photographic ideas. I will implemented it next year! :) @Doc_MacPro

Masafumi Ohta Thank you for your advices. You are my OpenSolaris master! @masafumi_ohta

Jesslee Cuizon Don’t forget the photowalks for next year! :) @J3SSL33

Thanks also to TLUG guys:

Edward Middleton I promise to assist to more TLUG nomikais next year! :) @E14n

Alberto Tomita Next year you will find it!

Tim, Henri, Josh, Keith, Mauro

And thanks to all the other people that I didn’t include or I still don’t live in the network or that I don’t know your links. Thank you for your support!

My most special thanks goes to @tangerinejp without your support nothing would be possible!! :******

Photography is the only art capable of capturing the Present from the stream of the river of time; from which we can only grasp the constant flow of Past and Future.

I think that this is Photography. Compared to other arts, Photography is capable of capturing the flying instant, the concept of instant in the time, the fixed and never-changing moment of reality. Photography breaks the stream of the world we live in; it stops the process of mutation and transformation of reality. It lets us open a window to something that is present but that we are not able to capture by ourselves because we are only able to sense the constant stream of the river of time and its main events.

Every time I look at a photo, in that moment I’m looking at something that I will never see again. Something that even being in that moment and in that place, I would have never been able to see it as it is captured, because it is happening or it stopped happening. In the moment something is, it stops being so. The Present does not exist for us, only Past and imminent Future, only a stream. The camera lives in another time, it is born and dies during the moments when light crosses it. After that, the silence. Everything ends and only something called photo is left, something that stores the instant, the invisible moment, but present for us.

Compared to other arts, the Photography is able to play with reality using the reality itself, the world and the universe as they are, seen from one of the unique and infinite possible points of view.

Now I feel Better :)

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.

In this work I could appreciate the instinct that moves the heart of a photographer to show the world which appeared to his eyes. This is the need to express our own feelings trough a light hunting machine as a camera. Camerota is showing here that instinct, that strong need to bring to our eyes what he catches with his own eyes, and what he felt in that moments, walking down hundred of streets all over the Japanese islands.

Here you have some pictures that show just a small part of this great work.

You can explore more about Camerota’s work at his company his Graffiti Japan work and his flickr account.

The book shows many crowded places of Tokyo with actually nobody in the streets. It has no photoshop editing, (at that time photoshop didn’t even exist) it’s the patient and hard job of a amazing photographer that could transmit that sense of loneliness of a big city.

One of the things that by which I got more impressed was when I saw some of those pictures. My brain in some way created the feeling and the image of people walking in there, but actually in those pictures there was no one.