Will Robb Photography

This week I went to photograph the “Whisky lovers awards 2009″ in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo for a whisky magazine. It was an event sponsored by Suntory, with the aim of giving whisky a cooler image, something they’ve been successfully working on for years.

For this event the place was packed with press, TV cameras everywhere and I had to join the queue of photographers who had to wait in a line and get given a spot to stand in about 10 meters away from the stage. In these kind of events you can’t move about as there are boundaries set up and you are surrounded by other photographers, all you can do is make the best of the situation. I was mainly shooting the award ceremony with my 80-200mm lens on my canon EOS 5D mkII body and had my 24-70mm lens on my old EOS 5D body, but I didn’t use it so much during the award ceremony as there was too much of a contrast in the lighting (bright on the subjects, black all around them) to make for a good wide shot for a magazine spread. After the awards though, I had to do some product shots with the whisky’s they had in the bar there, also I had to shoot some portraits of Suntory’s chief blender, Seiichi Koshimizu, so there I used my 24-70 lens a lot. The lighting in general was quite dark, so I had to use my 580EX flashes a lot, angling them up to the ceiling and bouncing the light down. Otherwise there would just be nasty shadows. I always have to lug a big bag of equipment around with me, work and exercise at the same time.

For this event Suntory had decided to give award to some whisky ambassadors as it were, people in the media spotlight who look good with a bottle in front of them. As I’d mentioned in an earlier blog whisky suffered from having the image of an “old mans drink” and the whole industry wasn’t going to well, but with big corporations like Suntory putting on events like this and having many commercials on TV featuring musicians and actors, whisky is becoming cool in Japan and it’ selling big time. For the awards, all they really did was parade a few famous faces out on stage, ask them how they drink their whisky, what whisky means to them, get all of us snappers to put their faces in the media a bit more with a bottle of whisky and Suntory does some more business. I’m all for that though, I do love a good whisky and I’m glad to be be playing my little bit in the big machine that brings whisky into our lives.

Anyway, they had different sections to the awards, first there was the “new Whisky lovers awards” (which was aimed at the promoting whisky as young and hip) which went to the actor Hiroki Nariyama and the actress Chiaki Kuriyama, who appeared in the Kill Bill movies as the school girl assassin.

Then they had the “Best whisky lovers awards” (the slightly more mature and refined crowd) which went to Koyuki (the leading actress in the Last Samurai) and the singer/songwriter Masayoshi Yamazaki who actually looked really bored and sleepy most of the time, out of the hundreds of shots I got of him only a handful had him smiling.

Last but not least, they brought in the “Whisky Master Award” for the biggest face in the Japanese media, actor, comedian and one of the few movie directors well known outwith Japan, Takeshi Kitano (who acted in and directed Battle Royale and Zatoichi to name a few). He was actually quite a funny guy, he brought a really good atmosphere to the event. I was really sorry that I could only snap him from 10 meters away, would have loved to have done some portraits with him. Mind you, given the choice of all 5, I think I’d like to do a session with Chiaki Kuriyama…

So, no close up portraits which was a shame, I got an OK group portrait of them all and then afterwards I did close ups of awards, drinks and the master blender of Suntory. I actually quite liked the product shots I did, hopefully Suntory will see them and think “lets hire this guy to do some work for us.” Fingers crossed.