tokyo auto salon 2013

Ever since I had two lovely attention seeking children (gotta spend more time with them now until they disappear with their friends), I no longer has all the time in the world to pursue my hobby of photography and polish the pixels after each session, even if I had the chance.

After the photoshoot at Tokyo Auto Salon 2013 at MBS, i spent about about two hours to select and post process the pictures. The haste resulted in some pictures being dropped in the first pass, which would otherwise had made the cut if I had look through them more carefully. Anyway, the following are additional pictures after doing a second pass of the raw files. For these, I could took some effort to fine tune the exposure, cropping out distracting background artefacts etc.

I posted the above picture before in the previous blog on the Tokyo Auto Salon 2013. But I find a tighter crop nicer.

True intention

Took leave on friday just to attend this event. I came specifically for the models. What better chance than a motor show to pay one fee and get to shoot so many of them. And I make no effort to hide my intention and told my wife I took leave today to take pictures of models.

Strange adminstration

But before I can even begin recording a single pixel, some administrative issues right at the beginning almost piss me off. Most of us photographers already anticipated the crowd and bought tickets online. But the peculiar thing is that we need to exchange our online receipt for actual ticket on site. When most of us arrived at 9.30am, there was already a long queue to collect our tickets. There were about 6 booths for tickets, 3 for internet booking and 3 for on site ticket purchase. There was no queue for the latter! At 10am, one could easily had paid and got ticket on site and head straight in, while online ‘ticket’ holders had to queue and had our ‘vouchers’ verified against our identity and transaction record in their system, making ticket collection even more frustrating. This is friday, I wonder how the situation will be like over the weekend, when most of the crowd are expected to arrive.

Let’s begin

Anyhow, I didn’t waste my time queuing as I was able to finish reading Straitstimes online by the time I collect my ticket… and finally I can begin taking pictures. The first model I encountered was one of the J-girls. She was ‘off limits’ though, as only press photographers can take pictures of her within a cordon and I’m not so keen to fight with the crowd of photographers outside the cordon to take a good shot. So make do with this to complete my ‘set’ of pictures today.

More of them appeared onstage later, together with the Japanese group, AKB48.

More models

There were many models at various stations, posing besides cars or as promoters in booths distributing pamphlets once the bunch of crazy photographers like me had taken enough pictures. After attending a few roadshows or our photoshoots such as those organised my SAFRA photography club, I saw many familiar faces.

Other typical models, special attendance by the J-girls and AKB48, there was also some stage events. One was a drum performance during the opening ceremony and the other was a cheer leading performance, by the Magnum Force Cheerleader.

Lessons learnt

I rarely had a chance to do portrait photography with models and since my wife ban flash photography with my kids, I learnt a great deal about flash photography today.

Don’t save on batteries. After perhaps more a few hundred flashes, the recharge cycle for my flash slow so much that cost me many shooting opportunities. I’ll try getting the Energizer lithium batteries next time
Getting a bigger flash. I’m using a 2-battery FL36R, for the next event that I’ll attend, I might want to get a bigger flash, perhaps the 4-battery FL50R.