Will Robb Photography

Our first publication of the year rolled out on January 1st, quite a good one to start off with, the cover of the Lonely Planet “Tokyo Encounters” guidebook. The shoot itself took place almost a year before and was one of our quickest of 2011 and it produced the least amount of images from any shoot we did, only 38 in total and we were done in a couple of minutes, but getting to that shoot has been a fairly long personal journey.

I’m pretty sure I touched on this a while back, but in a way Lonely Planet was sort of the reason I got into photography, so being able to work for them and get some publications with them gives me a lot of satisfaction.

14 years ago, when I was 20 years old I took my first photographs. I was in my third year of university, studying psychology at the University of St-Andrews and during the summer holidays I went off to Thailand for a month and then Malaysia, Singapore and Borneo for a month. I’d never taken any photos up until then and I’d realized I’d had nothing solid to remind me of all the good times I’d spent with people, so I wanted something to help me record my memories of my first big trip and I bought a little point and shoot canon camera and figured I’d use a roll of film a day and took one roll for each day I traveled. I headed off South East Asia with a ruck sack, my new camera, some rolls of film, enough cash to allow me to stay in the cheapest places and get the local buses everywhere and a few Lonely Planet guidebooks from which I would choose places to visit. I’d choose mainly on the basis of the photos I saw and when I arrived places I saw in my guidebook, I’d try to figure out where the photo was taken from and I’d try to go to the same spot to try and get the photos like I saw in my guidebooks and from then on I was hooked on photography and I remember thinking “how cool would it be to take photos for a guidebook!” That thought always stayed with me and I really become hooked on travel and photography from then on. I remember returning to university and being so disappointed that my travels were over, I sat in the library studying for tests but my head was way off somewhere else, exploring the rainforests in Borneo where I hiked and hitched lifts on logging ships, the temples of Thailand and the weird and wonderful people I met. Study just didn’t seem so interesting any more after I’d seen a bit more of the world. I knuckled down and studied hard, graduated, was offered a Wellcome prize scholarship to got to the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at U.C.L in London to study for a Ph.D whilst doing research on human memory using fMRI and E.R.P technology. It was one of these things that sounded more difficult than it was. I was spending sometimes up to 18 hours a day at my computer or in the labs, running massive statistics (computers were slow back then) to find which areas of the brain had increased blood/electrical activity when subjects encountered in a test phase, a word of picture they had seen in a study phase and then I had to compare it to the brain activity seen when subjects encountered new words or pictures they hadn’t seen during a study phase. For the first 3 months I felt very lucky to have been given such a good scholarship to study somewhere so good and I genuinely felt honoured, but after 6 months I began wondering “is this really what I want to be doing in life?” After a year I told my supervisor I wanted to quit, but seeing as how I’d already done a lot of the work needed for my Ph.D I was persuaded to stay on for another year to complete things. I stayed, but each day in the lab just made me more and more frustrated, I took a trip to Peru for a month I told my supervisor I was going away for a few days and sent an email from Peru saying I’d be back in a month….didn’t go down too well) with my best friend to try and sort my head out whilst trekking the Inca trail and even climbing some 6000 m + peaks. Once again, I had my Lonely Planet guidebook with me and it helped take me to different places and I tried to take photos like I saw there. However, this trip just made me yearn for more adventures and I came back to London even more down about my life and I really remember each day struggling to get out of bed and go to the lab. I wanted to quit, but everyone told me I’d be stupid to do so, I’d soon get my Ph.D, I had a glittering career ahead of me, I was already getting a lot of publications in respected journals, so if I just hung on a little bit more…anyway, here are some screen shots from my old publications:

Two years into my Ph.D and I felt I couldn’t hand on anymore, I really felt like I was going crazy, working in an office with the same guys for 2 years and other than saying “hello” in the morning and “see you tomorrow” when we left, we barely talked. It was all about work. When we had tea break and I met other researchers, they talked about work. I just felt like I didn’t fit in, I didn’t have the drive they did to be scientists, I had kind of fallen into it as it was an easy option for me and I felt guilty as my supervisor kept reminding me a lot of people would have given anything to be in my position, and if I just stuck at it a little bit longer…….

So, a few months after coming back from Peru, I went home via a bookstore and picked up a book of short stories by Leo Tolstoy, I believe there were 4 stories, but two of them I remember clearly, “The death of Ivan Illyic” and “How much land does a man need.?” Both stories about how we lead our lives before we die. Both of the main characters have lives they enjoy, but in the pursuit of money, or land they change how they live and the outcome wasn’t happy. These stories had a huge impact on me, I felt like I was the characters, pursuing a life I wasn’t happy with and not leaving as I was being paid well, I was about to become a Dr. (I did like the idea of calling myself Dr. I must admit), but most of all it just made me realize that there was a lot of things in life I wanted to do but was basically too scared to go and do it and I could imagine myself being 40 years old, stuck in a lab and being thoroughly miserable and being full of regrets. so they next day I went straight to my supervisor, quit my Ph.D with less than a year remaining and a few months later I landed in Japan. I only planned on coming for a year and I started working as a teacher in a language school, but then I soon began teaching in university which gave me long holidays where I could travel more in Japan and around Asia and take photos as I did it, so I decided to stay a bit longer and with all the time off I had I started taking more and more photos and learning whatever I could, mostly from friends who were already photographers. I started having small exhibitions of photos, getting some publications here and there and over time my hobby started to became a job, first just little things here and there, but over time things grew and grew. Ten years on I am getting ready to leave Japan, I am leaving with a wonderful wife, a lot of good memories, a different outlook on life and a job I am really in love with as well, so it’s kind of nice to have one of my final publications in Japan being on the cover of a book by a company who in some way played a part in me getting here in the first place. I’ve made a lot of mistakes down the years, but now I don’t have any regrets about my life is now.

Soon Sue and I are starting over again and there are no guarantees it will all work out for us, but now we are satisfied with what we have achieved in Japan and life here is going well for us, it’s time to move on again and pursue new challenges, because we know if we didn’t, ten years from now we may well just be looking back and thinking “what if we just tried those things we dreamed of?” A new journey is about to start, it’s scarey, there are no guarantees, but there won’t be any regrets about not trying.

Anyway, back to the original topic of the post, our first publication of the year. I only meant to write about the shoot itself, but it just turned into something completely different as I’m sitting in our living room enjoying my Saturday morning coffee….I think I am getting nostalgic these days. So, it was almost exactly a year ago I got an email from Lonely Planet asking me if I’d be interested in shooting the cover of their next “Tokyo Encounters” book and I was more than happy to say yes. The deadline for getting it done was pretty tight, but a couple of phone calls, a fax and an email later and everything was fixed for us to do an early morning shoot of an artwork in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in the Ginza area of Tokyo. We had to do early morning to minimize and inconvenience to guests, so we were up at 4am to get the first train from our place just after 5am on a cold January morning with our camera bag, tripod bag and a change of clothes for Sue as she was going to be an addition to the shot:

We arrived at the Peninsula about 5.50am. Our scheduled time to shoot was pretty generous, from 6am-6.30am, but we already had our goal in mind, a shot of the artwork in the lobby, focus on it, with Sue admiring it and having her dark to keep the focus on the art, so to be honest we didn’t really need that much time. Sue got changed, I set up the tripod with my 5DmkII and 24-70mm f2.8L and 580EX speedlite, I did some test shots to check the ambient light and see if I needed any fill light (just a little, so I powered down the flash quite a bit) and I were ready to shoot.

Seeing as how we already had the image in mind we wanted to get, there wasn’t a lot of options other than having Sue in different places for each shot, so I did some of her standing and some of her walking past the art work. I put on my 50mm f1.2L lens for a couple of shots, but within a couple of minutes I had enough material I was happy with and we wrapped it up, no fuss whatsoever much to the pleasure of the hotel’s PR manager who was quite happy we were done so quickly and without any fuss. I think he was quite surprised, but there was no point in flogging a dead horse and doing much more than we needed. Sue got changed, I packed up and we headed to the world’s biggest fish market, Tsukiji, which was nearby, so we could have a nice fresh sushi breakfast. Then we went home, I edited up and sent 10 different cuts to Lonely Planet, here are some examples:

Finally, the editors chose this image to become the cover shot:

And here’s how it finally looked, not too bad at all:

I ordered a couple of copies online and sent them to my parent’s place in Scotland, so we’ll see finally see it when we get there…only another 73 days.