I was invited by Yannick to come and photograph a men fashion show in Aoyama,
in a club called the Orbient.
The designer is called Paul Marchand (obviously French!) and is teaching in
Tokyo. Most of the work there was done with the help of his devoted
students.
That was my first real assignment and I was a little anxious going there as
I had never done that before.
I wouldn't say that the pictures are outstanding, but they're much better than
what I expected, considering that the room was quite dark, the models moving
fast, no tripod (my arm started to hurt after a few minutes because of the
weight of the camera!).
Definitely, I think the camera helped a lot... I don't think I could have made
it with my old D30, which had a lot of difficulties focusing in the dark...
With my 10D, I could take pictures of people I couldn't even see myself with
my own eyes and focus was just incredibly accurate!
The show it itself was very interesting, although I have to admit some of the things I saw would be quite difficult to wear in the office ! ;)
There are basically 3 sections here:
- The 1st show, meant to be seen by the press and other fashion designers
- The 2nd show, same models, same collection but just for the audience
- Pictures taken "backstage" and other pictures of the audience
Don't miss the new updates in the Origami page by Master Tuan Luong
The work accomplished there is really fantastic!
Don't miss either the masters of this discipline in the Tuan's links, and especially Kamiya Satoshi's gallery, which I just find stunning
I've just realized that I still hadn't put up some of
the pictures I had taken during my trip to France in late
2002.
All the pictures taken in France were taken in Saint-Emilion (Unesco World Heritage)
by a cold but sunny day.
Saint-Emilion is of course well-known by wine amateurs, but it is also a
beautiful medieval city where you can find excellent French restaurants.
Additionally, I included 3 pictures taken in London during a one-day trip to visit some friends
While I was visiting some blogs, I noticed an interesting link to something called blogshares
It's actually a trading game, where you can buy shares of blogs, which stand for companies, the value of the share changing depending on the number of links pointing to the weblog, to its activity, etc.
I think the principle is quite funny and it may be fun to play, even if you don't have a weblog yourself, just to see how good you could be in trading ;)
As a competent analyst (arff ;D), I highly recommend shiromi's diary as a fast growing blog with a high potential ! :D
Have fun !
It was a warm night, after a hard day... I could hardly stand up
and keep myself awake. I was feeling dizzy and I couldn't think about anything
else than to go to bed.
Then, I started thinking about what Yannick told me today: he's going to
organize a fashion show and he proposed me to come over and take a few
pictures.
I have never done that before, but I thought it would be a fun experience
I was getting excited about the idea but also scared at the same time, not
knowing how to shoot, whether I should use the flash or not, what lens to take
with me, etc.
About the last one, I think my 28-135IS would still be the most appropriate
one (until I get the 24-70L!) for its wide range of focal length.
However, I was a little worried about its ability to focus in low light so I just forgot about my tiredness and went out to try it out (I haven't shot with it much lately, putting in front the 16-35L) and went to take my own "prada" shot, that new building in Aoyama that must have been shot by hundreds of photographers, I presume
I had in mind a few shots such as Fred's or another one
from a most excellent weblog called Tokyo shoes,
but I was wondering how I could have my own personal shot
I wanted someone in the shot for the picture to really show the crazyness of
that building and I was quite lucky as I didn't have to wait too long until 2
girls stopped by to have a look at some shoes
I couldn't wait for another opportunity like this one, as it was already late at night and that the probability for more people to drop by was quite low (if you put aside the drunk salary men, of course...), so I grabbed my camera, and took the shot hand-held (exposure: 1/30s) at ISO400, taking advantage of the low noise of the 10D.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the shot was sharp, in spite of all the hot discussions on the web concerning the alledged unability of the 10D to properly focus, no camera shake either and very clean for ISO400 :)
Have a look at the tokyo page where there is another picture I took on my way to prada
I feel a little better about my camera and the capability of this lens, but
I'm still worried about the fashion show which should happen on Thursday
night.
The pictures will be posted as soon as I can.
We had a quick party in the
office for Candice who's returning to France with Arthur, Tom and Gaelle, who
was at the party too.
On the other hand, Sebastien will follow later this year.
I took some pictures but the light was just awful (those neon lights,
combined to a flash bouncing on yellow walls) and it's just a nightmare to get
the skintones right :( so I used the "sepia trick", in order not to have to
manage the colors...
I actually kind of like the way the pictures came out with this sepia tone,
but it's a just a little too much when there are too many pictures, so I guess
I'll have to work on them again when I have some more time...
I hate the rainy season.
It's hot and humid, it's raining all the time, you can't sweat because of the
high humidity and it makes you feel sticky the whole day...
Yet, while I was waiting for the rain to stop, I noticed
some droplets hanging on a bamboo stick outside of my apartment.
I rushed to get my camera, my new macro lens and my tripod to capture this
divine instant. The picture does not really give justice to the actual scene
though... I wish I could have got closer or take more time to adjust the depth
of field but time was running against me.
I'm sure it will rain again and again for the next few days so I'll try to get a better picture then.
I'm finally ending up waiting for the rain now !
In the meantime, you can see the full version of the picture I took yesterday, also accessible from the "anything" section.
Do you get what you pay for? RCTHost, my hosting server has been quite good and incredibly reasonable until recently but what happened recently is just amazing...
It started a few months ago with the upgrade of the Cpanel, the interface
which allows you to control your website when you don't have a shell (telnet
or ssh access).
It seems that they just tried to upgrade that module but the server just
couldn't take it and was suffering from a high CPU usage, instability,
rebooting several times a day, etc.
That was still ok at that time, considering that I'm only using this server to host my homepage and receive emails. The only painful thing for me was that I didn't have access to the statistics of my website, to check the bandwidth utilization or the popularity of my homepage ! Obviously, nothing serious
However, what happened 2 days ago is just unbelievable...
In the afternoon, I noticed that the server was not responding anymore. I
thought about one more mere reboot again and let it go.
A few hours later, the server was still not responding. I was getting upset
because I was expecting some emails and dropped them a note in their helpdesk
interface to know what happened
The next day, the ticket was "closed" (there is apparently no status for
acknowledged, or at least, they don't seem to use it much).
The message was saying that the server had been compromised (understand
hacked) by a Trojan Horse.
As a result, they were not able to boot the server properly and had to go
for a full reinstallation of the OS and to restore the accounts and data. No
need to mention that this is obviously a lengthy process, which lasted about
36 hours in my case.
You want to hear more about this fascinating story ? When they tried to
restore users' data, they realized that the previous problems they had just
prevented them from "backuping" data properly, so the latest backup they had
was the one made on April 19th !
They could have tried to take the physical harddisk of the crashed server
and mount it on a healthy one to copy data over to ensure data integrity...
Instead, they just went for a full reinstallation, assuming that they had a
recent full backup, which would allow them to recover data(which is IMHO a bad
choice anyway, since data is likely to have changed since the latest
backup...).
Well, to be honest, they claim they have tried to convince the actual
engineers in charge of their datacenter to do so, but they just didn't listen
to them... right...
Fortunately enough, I had done a backup of my site 10 days before that
catastrophy happened and I "just" had to upload the files again and to
readjust what I had done between my last backup and now.
However, I just do not know how many mails I've lost because people didn't try
to resend the message, or tried and gave up since the server was down for more
than 24 hours :(
I'm still among the lucky ones. Some people there are running a business
there and every hour of unavailability is more money lost, not to mention the
reputation of their business, which is way more difficult to restore then just
data on a server.
Some others don't have local backups for the last 2 years and were relying on
the hosting server's stability or were hoping that the backups would work...
Big mistake !
I will stay with rcthost as of now, because I'm not running anything
critical on their server and for their very low price, but I'll make sure I
make backups on a regular basis. I was just lucky this time but it could have
been much worse.
After the accounts were available again, Rcthost was claiming that the server
should be stable and running without problems (although I started to upload my
files when I got an error message and realized that the server had rebooted
again).
Yet, I can't help wondering about the actual stability of the company behind this service and I do not know whether this was just an exceptional situation or if this is how it starts, until the customers start leaving because data is lost...
One more thing today: the code of this weblog is a valid XHTML 1.0 transitional code...
The XHTML 1.0 strict is just too difficult to achieve right now !..
I'm not quite sure I will be able to convert all the other pages too, that
sounds like a lot of work but I guess that could be done easily with some perl
script after all ;-)
I finally got this writeback plugin to work !
It was working all along actually, it's just that because of my stupid setup,
the plugin was "confused" about all the redirections and all
I believe some day, there will be a patch to take this into account, but in
the meantime, I set blosxom the way it should work and the plugin is just
working perfectly !
What I had done: set a .htaccess file to redirect all requests to
index.html to index.shtml.
Then the index.shtml file was calling the /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi script.
Somehow, that didn't work
What I did to make it work: use the same .htaccess file but instead of using a index.html, I redirect the request to /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi directly.
The downside of this is that the cgi-bin script appears in the path of the
browser.
There are some instructions in the faq of blosxom (which I have to confess I
only read today !) to prevent that, but I need to look into it later on
Feel free to leave a comment now !
I've just added one more Blosxom plugin, which allows you to see the tree
of categories and pick the one you like right away.
I've tried to sort all the previous entries and put them in the right
category, but I still have to split some since they were dealing with 2
different topics ...
It's actually really fun to work on my homepage from a different point of view and providing new features, instead of just updating the contents :-)
