I’ve been thinking about how to get an analogue feel photo like Robinson uses, but have decided to just use my Canon 5D Mark ii with a 35mm or 85mm f1.2 and if I want to make it look more hipster analogue I can just use Lightroom or Photoshop in post-production. I also think I’ll use naturalistic lighting with a shutter speed of around 1/500 and a high ISO to capture good clarity.

So then I did a little bit of research to receive a bit of insight into the mind of Robinson. Which led me to an interview that was  published in the Oyster Mag (October 24 2016) which stated that his recent photobook called After Hours was about the “Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu and his films that focus on “moments in-between”. His films will cut away to random shots irrelevant to the progression of plot and this invokes a kind of poetic realism around characters that extends their world beyond what we see on screen. Ozu, and other filmmakers who use similar techniques, like Hayao Miyazaki and Hirokazu Kore-eda, tend to describe this as “mu” or “ma” and it stresses the importance of the interval or negative space. In After Hours, James J. Robinson shot “exclusively at night…during the in-between of busy weekdays and took advantage of this calm temporal moment when most people have switched off”. I like how Robinson has inspiration himself when producing his own photos. Thus making me look at Ozu’s work, in order to get a sense of what he’s trying to portray.