This year has been a year of necessity for me personally in many regards, and much of what makes me truly tick and truly motivates me had to be put on hold. A large part of the year was dedicated to the maintenance of this site, particularly in improving the layout, speed, and security. Sitting at a desk and coding is far from my idea of fun, but it had to be done. I have been seeing allot more traffic from all over the world recently, and my site was often ranked very high in google, but it was sporatic. So I set out to minimize, stabilize, and optimize all aspects of this site. The changes though seemingly surface deep with a different looking landing page are actually much more complex than I dare to unpack here, but to you the visitor, they are genuinely all positive. Beyond speed and rock solid security, I have removed the few cookies that existed, as I was never a fan of being tracked and would like to respect my customers and not be a part of that method of marketing. I can see very basic things like how many people visited my site, what countries and IP’s visit my site, I can see where they came from if they enter my links from other sites, and where they go on my page, but there is no identifying info being gathered, and no information about where one goes when they leave my site. This is as it should be in my opinion. In this nerd out of 2025-2026 I am particularly proud of the speed improvements. I have had very good speed in the past, but it always seemed the more I tried to improve my site, the more the speed was either effected negatively or unpredictable. In fact even as I truly dialed the speed in over the past few months, I was seeing wild swings in speed and some down right very slow speed up until just days ago particularly for mobile users. A break through finally came though, and as of now short of users being on dial up, my sight should be delivering all my photo galleries, the shopping cart, and all related pages and info lightening fast. I am very proud of this, and even more, I am very relieved. I am far to OCD to accept having a slow sight, because I am old enough to remember the pain of dial up and slow service. Living on the outskirts of Tokyo, I am very fortunate to have a fiber optic connection, so for me I truly had to dive deep to simulate the experience of others not so fortunate in their porthole to the internet speeds.. and of course many access the internet from their phone.
I will not dive into the details of security as I prefer keeping those secrets close to my chest, but the bottom line is, you would be hard pressed to find a more secure site. I had issues several years ago which taught me allot, and I tackled it immediately. Arguably I am over the top at this point, and to that end if you ever feel you have been locked out of my site mistakenly, please use a friend or family members device to contact me and I will be happy to lift the ban and when possible, explain what triggered it.
So what does all this nerd talk mean and why bore us with it?
What it means, is after 3 years of periodic fine tuning, and one full year of full out perfecting, I am now free! I will be adding new galleries, returning old galleries, and out there in the world getting new epic photos from Japan. Not that I ever stopped the latter, but the pace had been greatly reduced, as it’s hard to go out for the epic morning light when you were up all night adding code, and chasing down digital demons. For 2026 my focus will be shifting back to some of my early photography subjects, including “Birds of Japan” “Surfers of Japan” and I will be diving back into the city to bolster my “Cityscapes of Japan” Gallery as this has been on my radar for a very long time. I tend to prefer staying on the outskirts of Tokyo these days, but I plan to force myself to get in there, get my hands dirty, and get some epic Cityscapes, including light trails galore, and allot more! I will also be adding a gallery which I believe existed for about a week on this site “Traditional Japan” with this comes allot of freedom, cause arguably all that happens in Japan is tradition.. but I will be focussing on many back catalogs of photos I have aquired over the years from things like dance festivals, fireworks, traditional craft making and much much more. I am really looking forward to this one!
On top of this I will also be organizing with others to have my works seen publically in small local galleries and other events in Tokyo, Yokohama and beyond. This is a new thing for me, as I have always been a bit of a hermit, only sharing my works online. I’ve known for sometime I need to get out there and am very excited about this. When dates are locked in I will begin announcing events. I am hoping to begin early summer of this year, but I am literally just now at the point of origin for this quest.
Finally I will be doing the thing I have sorta been reluctant to do the most, and that is to document my adventures. I used to post on youtube, and I also have a back catalog of unposted stuff, because I never felt it was polished enough, but I am going to both put out the unpolished whenever I find the time to edit it down, and more importantly get out there and create new “Content”. I loathe that word and what it has become, but I will do my best to keep it true and humble (no hype). Essentially I quite literally want to just record me doing my thing. I will likely explain the process at times, but I want to keep it organic as much as I can to let you feel my world of photographic creation, because particularly with nature which is 99% of my world, I am not just there as a photographer, I am there as a person born to nature, visiting my true home and breathing it in. The camera is there to document the beauty and capture something worthy of sharing with others. If I was not a photographer, I would still be making these visits to nature, and talking to the air would be just weird, as is talking to a camera… but I will do my best to find a balance.
I think that’s about all I have to say for the moment, next blog will be less web development nerd out and more pure photography nerd out!
So welcome to the new and improved Film Studio Japan ! Have a look around, and if you have any questions, or special requests I am here to help.
