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Tokyo Drifter: Editorial and commercial photographer Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Azusa by Alfie Goodrich

First published in 1991 at the age of 23, portrait photographer Alfie Goodrich has been shooting primarily in Japan since 2007. His eye as a photographer as well as a fluency in both English and Japanese has brought him a diverse portfolio of commercial and editorial clients, including Ferrari, Lamborghini, United Airlines, Condé Nast, Air Asia and so many more.

Goodrich counts on more than just his bilingualism to bring him clients, however. He’s a master of SEO, as well, with a daily blog that pulls in between 40,000 to 80,000 unique visitors a month, a self-produced online magazine and a Google+ page that sports more than a million followers. When he’s not shooting, he also leads workshops and tours for photographers looking to work in Japan, and has even published his own Google guide to photogenic locations throughout urban Tokyo and Japan.

Find out more about Goodrich by clicking through the slideshow and accompanying Q+A. For more imagery, visit his website, www.alfiegoodrich.com and subscribe to his magazine ‘Stekki’. You can also follow him on his blog, Google+, Facebook, Instagram, 500px, and Flickr.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Kamakura by Alfie Goodrich

You began your career as a music portraitist and photojournalist in the UK. What was behind the transition to travel reportage and editorial work?

Actually, pretty much all of my professional photography work in the UK was done within the realm of the music business – which I was involved in from 1992 to 2002. Whilst I was PR Director for Nimbus Records, I shot a lot of stuff for CD covers, at recording sessions and events I was organising. Later, whilst general manager for Black Box Music in London, I did more of the same. Once I left music and started my own business, I started to mix up the subject matter a little more, providing a one-stop shop for people needing PR, websites, hosting and photography to promote and market their own companies. As my career changed, so did the subject of my photography.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Akari by Alfie Goodrich

When did you decide to make the move from England to Japan, and why did you decide to stay there?

My wife is Japanese. We met in the UK and lived together there for seven years, having two of our three children during that time. We’d been thinking of moving to Japan for some time. I lost both my parents within six months of each other, in 2005 and 2006. After that, we needed a change of scene. My parents had been very active in the local community, as had I. They were good times but, yes, a change was required.

I had some friends in business, some of whom were doing very well from diverse, international businesses built up over decades. People like that generally have a good sense for what’s in the wind. One of them, who had some experience of business in Asia, warned me that he felt Europe had some hard times ahead and that my thinking about a move to Japan was a good idea.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Fuji by Alfie Goodrich

(cont.) We left the UK in October 2007 when the yen was 210 to the Pound. Under a year later, Lehman happened and the Yen-Pound rate dropped to 105 at one point. My friend was right. Asia and Japan have weathered the financial crisis a little easier than friends of mine have back in the UK. For me to work in the way I do in Japan but do that back in the UK, we’d be looking at living and raising a family in London. Tokyo is very different. It’s safe, safe for the kids and safe for me to do my job – often dripping in camera equipment – without ever needing to look over my shoulder.

That’s one reason we’ve stayed here. Anther is that here I am different. I’m not a local. I have a different eye for Japan than a local photographer does; different working methods. I’ve made that work in my favour.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Johan – Akiko by Alfie Goodrich

Have you found any significant differences working in Japan as compared to working in the UK – not just culturally, but on the business side of things?

There are many differences between the UK and Japan and whilst nowhere is perfect, Japan and Tokyo tick a lot more boxes for us right now than London or the UK did. Little amusing things happen all the time, like asking if I could move a chair out of the background of a shot and having the company’s PR team all look at each other as though that was something that needed a board-level decision. My response at those times is just to make light of the situation, move the chair myself and then say ‘well, perfect… now you can blame the foreigner’.

There is a very hierarchical decision making process at work in Japan. Responsibility is a collective thing, not really down to individuals. That’s good in some ways but it can prolong decision making and during a shoot, things are often fluid and decisions need making quickly. Once you’ve built people’s trust with you then it’s different; they’ll give you more of a free reign over things.

One of the good things I would say here is that once you make business relationships, they tend to last. In the UK I would often come across the situation of having clients disappear to someone else based on cost: if Photographer X down the road was delivering Product A for £1 less an hour, then they’d move. That doesn’t happen in Japan. Trust and relationships take longer to build, which can be frustrating at first, but once you’ve made that relationship it isn’t really ever going to go south over trifling amounts of money.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Kawasaki Daishi by Alfie Goodrich

You mention in an interview that budgets have shrunk so companies are looking for local photographers to carry out campaigns rather than flying out a production. What measures have you taken to ensure that you’re the ‘go-to’ photographer that they will think of in Tokyo and these other cities?

In terms of how I compare, from a client’s perspective to, say, a Japanese photographer then I think the main difference is my eyes. I see things from a foreigner’s perspective. Japan is still new and fascinating for me, after almost a decade of living here. I work differently to the locals. That can sometimes be a curse but usually it’s a benefit; where it might take a Japanese photographer a team of seven people to do even a small fashion shoot, it takes me three. Working quicker, more efficiently is something I would say that is an advantage.

I spent a lot of time getting my web presence sorted out and integrating it with SNS sites. So I have a good footprint on the web and on the search-engines. The photography teaching I do also helps a lot, making my network of contacts here and abroad more diverse and giving me a something different to blog about and publish online, which isn’t just about my own work but about encouraging and championing others.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Asakusa by Alfie Goodrich

Besides speaking English and Japanese, what is it about your expatriate status that has given you a leg up over other photographers in Japan?

I am of course well-mannered and have respect for the local customs and culture, but being a foreigner means that it’s possible to skirt many of the conventions that hold local people back from being true to themselves 100%. I think for me it’s also about having come here at the right age. An old boss of mine once said that ‘when you get to 30, people take you more seriously. By the time you reach 40, you don’t give a shit whether they do or not!’.

I was 38 when I came here, with a wife and two children and on the back of just losing both my parents. Since then, we’ve had another child, I hit 40 and, to be very honest, I just have no time for bullshit anymore. Or for games. I’m also pretty happy with who I am. Still not perfect, obviously, but happy with the imperfections. There really is only ONE me.

Japanese people, because of the nature of their society, really don’t tend to get much chance to be totally themselves except when they are by themselves. They have one face for themselves, one for inside the house and one for outside the house… for work. Being myself and being happy with that person has been a large part of doing well here. You obviously have to have the skills to do the job, that goes without saying.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Baja by Alfie Goodrich

Since the beginning of the year, you’ve been an Ambassador for Hasselblad in Japan. How did that come about and what does that entail?

The boss of Hasselblad Japan is a Brit. Once we met, that certainly helped: shared heritage, same daft sense of humour, same propensity to swear every other word. I think he’d heard my name crop up quite a few times around the time that Hasselblad opened their shop and gallery here in Tokyo. The same had happened to me with his name. The foreign photographer community here is fairly compact and we were bound to meet each other eventually.

We had a meeting, talked about some of the things I was doing with photo education and which I was keen to explore with a camera company, especially one as legendary as Hasselblad. The boss and I got on well, we spent a bit more time hanging around with each other, I knew they had an ambassador programme and eventually we ended up talking about it and I was offered a post. It’s been a lot of fun.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Alfie Goodrich and his travel pack

What do you shoot with?

• Hasselblad H5D-50c
• Hasselblad H4D-40 as backup
• Nikon D800E
• Fujifilm X100 [borrowed from a friend]
• Countless lenses

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Iambo-ishii by Alfie Goodrich

What is it about the Hasselblad system that first appealed to you as a commercial portraitist?

First of all, the people at Hasselblad are human, friendly, passionate and down to earth. Yes, it’s business and of course it has to make money and be viable. But it’s about more than that. It’s about giving people an experience, sharing that feeling of joy and excitement that comes from having a truly awesome piece of machinery in your hands to take photos with… but at the same time, making sure it’s not all about gear. It’s about the image, the photo, the moment. The gear is crucial but it’s not everything.

As a perfectionist, I love being around people that are the same and Hasselbad are truly perfectionists. People often ask why the cameras are so expensive… well, part of the reason is that they are perfectionists. Craftsmen, perfectionists. And really, nowadays, buying a digital Hasselblad well of course they are not cheap but having one is the closest you will get to a ‘camera for life’. In the digital, throwaway, planned obsolescence society we live in now that’s a hard thing to say. But it’s true. So now imagine that camera for life and having unlimited free film, forever… and it doesn’t seem quite so expensive anymore.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Meijimura by Alfie Goodrich

(cont.) For me, why does Hasselblad appeal to me? The colour rendition is amazing, very film-like. Skin tones are perfect straight out of the camera. The True Focus system [which uses a gyro in the camera to re-focus after you have re-framed] helps me shoot at the large apertures I like and still nail the focus every single time.

The range of lenses is great and as ambassador I get to use what I like, as long as they have one available at the time. So, after really only using the 80mm and the 28mm a lot from the HC range before this year, I’ve been playing a lot with the amazing 300mm F4.5, the 210mm and the 120mm macro. I’ve also had a lot of fun with the CFV-50c digital back for the old film Hasselblads which is, for me, the fantasy come true of having all the wonderful usability of the older cameras but the convenience of the digital back.

The Hassie flash syncs up to 1/800th sec. That and the range of lenses they have, which often stop down to F32 and F45, give you a lot of flexibility to kill the sun when you are shooting with flash outdoors. The Nikon only syncs to 1/250th.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Ruri by Alfie Goodrich

As a Hasselblad Ambassador, you have ‘kid in a candy store’ access to their lenses. What have been a few of your favorite lenses so far?

Like I said before, the 300mm is astonishing: super sharp wide open at F4.5 and still super sharp when you stop it down to F45. It’s not light but it’s perfectly balanced. A joy to use and I use it hand-held a lot.

The 120mm macro is so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Lovely handling too. The first one I spent time with was the 100mm F2.2. I used to have the old Zeiss manual-focus 110mm F2 which was a beautiful lens. But it was seductive at F2, drawing you in what the lovely bokeh, only to leave you on the rocks of despair when you realised half the shots were out of focus.

With Hasselblad’s True Focus, you can shoot the 100mm all the way open at 2.2 and be sure to nail the focus every time. The 24mm is something also try to get my hands on when I can. Pretty much the widest lens for digital medium format and stunning on the right circumstances of subject matter. The TS1.5 tilt-shift converter has been fun too. I could go on… I mean, it’s a nice candy store.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Shinyong Kimono by Alfie Goodrich

You also shoot with the Nikon D800, D700 and D3X. When do you find yourself employing that system instead of Hasselblad? How do the two systems compare?

When I need lighter more compact cameras I use the Nikons. I don’t mind weight but if I need to hand-hold a shot at 1/4 sec then that’s more likely to be doable with the Nikon. I also have a lot of old Nikon glass which I like using a lot on the new cameras. So, sometimes it’s just because I have a lot of lenses at my fingertips that I use the Nikons. For shooting at a higher frame-rate, the Nikons win every time. Hasselblad is not built for that.

You have to play a camera, any tool, at its strengths. That goes for weatherproofing too. My D700 now has about 650,000 pushes on the shutter and has been through five typhoon seasons with me… and it’s been in the sea. The camera is practically bullet-proof. Best thing Nikon made since the F4, IMHO.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Keihincanal by Alfie Goodrich

(cont.) The Hassie I shoot the most is a CCD sensor camera, the H4D-40. It’s not a high ISO camera and I rarely shoot it above 400 ISO, although it’s still doing OK at 1600. The colour on the CCD chip vs the CMOS in the Nikons is huge. The dynamic range too. If I need large dynamic range, if the colour is super important and required to be nailed in the camera then I use the Hassie. I hardly do any post- production on the Hasselblad shots. If I am in the studio, it’s Hassie all the way.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Shinyong by Alfie Goodrich

With more than a million followers of Google+, do you have any tips for managing a presence on the site? Why has it become your social media site of choice?

I’m sort of getting back to Flickr too lately after a long break. Yeah, Google+… well I had a friend invite me to it very early, almost from day one of the site being open. The big thing for me was to investigate how well it integrated with other Google products, particularly whether it had any bearing on SEO and how far up Google you came. There are lots of articles out there on the net about G+ having no discernible effect on SEO. I’m not a techie but I can tell you that it has helped me get found.

One of the first reasons I was also attracted to G+ was that, via a plugin I have called Google+ Blog which was developed by photographer and coder Daniel Treadwell. It’s allowed me to post on Google Plus via by iPhone and have the posts pulled out and cross-published on my WordPress sites by the plugin. That solved two issues for me: first was that there was really no decent app on the iPhone for blogging on a WordPress site.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Rebel Rebel by Alfie Goodrich

(cont.) Secondly, the cross-posting gave me three bites of the SEO cherry with a post that shared the exact same title as the one on G+. And Daniel’s plugin preserves a link back to GPlus in the footer of each post. All these things have conspired to create a situation where, if I get clever about what I call my posts on G+, searches on Google’s main search engine containing the same words can mean me getting listed on page one of Google within 40 minutes of making the post. That’s powerful marketing for a small business or freelancer.

I’ve made some good friends there and you always have to give something to get anything back in life. So, putting out rich posts that have a backstory about how I shot the pic and why; these posts have always got good attention and allowed me to cultivate a nice audience.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Yokohama Rain by Alfie Goodrich

You’re also quite active on several other social media fronts. Which do you recommend photographers invest their time in the most?

Facebook is, for me, really just about keeping in touch with friends, making some new friends and having a personal place to chat informally. I don’t really use it for work. It’s my garden fence over which to gossip. The main thing I hate about FB for photography is that the JPEG compression is awful. It makes photos you post there look bad, so why would I use it so much for that? Google+ is all about photography. Flickr started in 2006 for me and now they have sorted out the look and the usability of the site, I am getting back to using it more. Tumblr I use as a scrapbook, moodboard and ideas archive. Twitter I am starting to use more but really just getting my head around it even now.

I think the biggest thing for photographers to get sorted is their own website. Get a decent platform for it which for me is WordPress. Then make it look nice but don’t over spec it. It’s all about your work, not fancy animations, complicated navigation or anything too clever. People want to see images and to get to see a decent cross-section of your work as quickly as possible, in a mobile and web-friendly way.

SNS should then relate back to your website. I post links on FB and link to my work on my sites. That generates traffic and sows links out there on the web and the amount of links a search engine sees to your site helps it bump you up the table for page ranking. As for what to post on SNS, give people something. It should not all be ‘me, me me’ and really not, on FB for instance, be about ‘come and like my page’. You have to find a unique voice for yourself.

Today is different. We have to be photographers and agent, promoter and marketer. That’s hard to do for long without occasionally disappearing up your own backside. Find a way to promote yourself that also educates or enriches the people seeing your posts. That’s really where the photography teaching has helped me; I like passing things on, helping people enjoy their photography more. A lot of what I post on SNS is slanted that way.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Yumi by Alfie Goodrich

How does your Japanorama website tie into the rest of your endeavors? 

Japanorama was the first domain I had outside of one in my own name. I bought it way back, at first just because I liked the name and it was a domain I used to point to my pics of Japan. When we moved here, I changed the site to be something the reflected more of everything I do: the teaching, the work, stuff not shot by me but done by people I teach etc. It’s also the umbrella name under which I do business in Japan.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Mari by Alfie Goodrich

Would you speak a bit about your self-published magazine Stekki and what the process of putting together a magazine is like?

Stekki came about purely as a way to help students and workshop attendees get the experience of seeing their work in a magazine form. On workshops we’d shoot to a brief of making features to fill pages. People would need to think about a cover, double-page spreads, remembering to shoot vertical and horizontal. I get to see my work in magazines. That’s nice for me. I wanted to share that experience and make a magazine for people.

Plus, the discipline of shooting for the page, pre-visualising for the page, seeing someone edit your shots down and then fit them on to a page… this is good for people who are learning about photography. I’m shortly about to start designing and producing all the content for a real magazine here in Tokyo. That will help me move Stekki one step closer to being in print, which I think we can realistically see happening in 2016.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Momo Shoko Yoyogi by Alfie Goodrich

As well as shooting, you teach photography in Tokyo. What are a few of the things that photographers can expect to learn in your workshops and photowalks? Are there any less known locations that you can recommend for photographers who are making a visit to Japan?

I help people see. I help them pre-visualise, become visual literate as much as anything we do technically or physically with the camera. We’ll always work to some kind of brief or project and since the Stekki magazine idea came along, very often we’ll work together on shooting pages for that. I do one-to-one lessons, courses and workshops and at any one time there’ll be something going on across a few genres of photography, from fashion to landscape, travel to documentary or street. I tend to get off the beaten track a lot and actually earlier this year made a Google Map with more than 100 places and walks on it, each with a photo. You can find that here: http://japanorama.co.uk/2015/04/30/a-photographers-map-of-tokyo-japan/

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Mone Ohashi Tripych by Alfie Goodrich

You do a lot of location portraiture, what’s your chosen lighting system for working in these urban areas?

I’ve used lots of things and still do have a real mix of stuff. Recently I tried out the Profoto B2 kit for a few months and may well end up getting one. I like their B1 lights a lot as well. No cables. Huge benefit when working outdoors. I have an Einstein or two and the Paul Buff ring flash, which is fun. I still use a lot of small speed lights and radio triggers as well. I like the flexibility of clamping them onto a fence, railing or somewhere it would be hard to use stands or large lights.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Meijijingu by Alfie Goodrich

Does Japan have similar permitting issues as the US or the UK when it comes to commercial photography?

Japan is pretty good for photography. The main thing is about tripod and stand usage. There are plenty of areas in the cities where you can get away with light on a stand though. But the speed lights come in useful a lot for ‘gun and run’ type shoots.

The police never really bother me. It’s more the private security guards or guards that work for a building. If they think you are on their land, which at times can be hard to figure out, then they can be very persistent and annoying. Temples and shrines anywhere in Japan are pretty much either, ‘yes we are cool with you but it’s on a permission only basis’ or, ‘no, you can’t shoot commercially here’. They are usually pretty approachable and the ones that will let you shoot will usually turn around a request for permission in two weeks or less. Some even use email now! But be prepared in Japan for the surprise of how popular the fax machine still is.

Playing the ‘stupid foreigner’ card obviously is something I will do occasionally. I’m well mannered and polite but if I want a shot than I will try, within reason, plenty of things to try and get it. If pretending not to understand the rules is one, I’ll do it.

Tokyo Drifter: Alfie Goodrich on working in Japan

Mari by Alfie Goodrich

What was the experience of shooting Prince William, Duke of Cambridge like?

The experience of a lifetime. I mean, whatever you think about the royal family, being on an assignment with any super-VVIP level people is amazingly interesting: the organisation, the pace, the things you get to see and experience.? I spent four days with the Duke, as the British Embassy in Tokyo’s official photographer of his visit. I travelled in the convoy, went to all of the engagements in Tokyo and up in Tohoku. In four days I photographed the Duke, the Prime Minister, the Emperor and Empress, a Crown Prince and assorted other dignitaries. Not just from the press-pack perspective but as an embedded photographer. That opportunity doesn’t come around very often.

The Tohoku and Fukushima parts of the trip were especially poignant for me. My wife is from Fukushima and the majority of her family still live there. So when I got a chance, at the end of the trip, to speak with the Duke, I thanked him for taking the time to visit Fukushima. Lots of people had come out to see him. It meant a lot to them that someone like him would visit there home. Oh, and my two sons still hate me for the fact that – with the Duke – I managed to get inside the driver’s compartment of the bullet-train. You can only really do that if you have a Prince to get you in the door.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)