wooden ships

is the title to one of my favorite songs by Crosby, Stills and Nash. And now, meet Mr. Sueshiro Sano, master wood boatbuilder. Mr. Sano designed his first 22 ft mahogany ketch at the age of 15, completed and launched the boat himself by the age of 18. He is one of the very few remaining craftsman in Japan who designs and builds only wooden ships. He's a true artist who does his work for the love of it, and not for money reasons. As a result he often finds himself broke. Hmm.... that sounds famliar...

Mr. Sano's homepage: http://sanomagic.world.coocan.jp/englishindex.html

shapes, lines and light

Recently, I went to photograph an executive of a Danish firm. And ofcourse they have these beautiful Swan chairs designed by Arne Jacobsen in their lobby. The Egg chair and the Swan chair are timeless classics so this is where I wanted to set up the photo session. It was a cloudy day, so that light on the back wall wasn't even there when I started to set up. Then the sun shows up briefly, and it was magical. I love this photo because of all the shapes and lines in it.

Santa Barbara

Last fall, I did some pictures of my favorite city Santa Barbara for Japan Airline's First Class inflight magazine "Agora," which by the way finally came out last month. If any of you were lucky enough to fly first class in september, may be you saw it. At least I haven't.

And for all of us low class travelers, some of the pictures are posted at the world culture travel section of FM Tokyo/JAL Reco site. Just click the title for the link (they moved it, so now you have to find "vol.15" in the small list). It's only in Japanese so you won't be able read any of the text. I wonder if it might've been in English if there was a first class at the web site. I'm not too crazy about how they cropped most of the images, but it's kind of neat to see the images fade in and move around. Perhaps I should incorporate a slide show presentation with more of my pictures.