Flavio Gallozzi photographer meets karate master Shirai Hiroshi

Shirai Hiroshi is a karate master and is a living treasure of Japan, his mission was to bring to the West and particularly Europe, the true and traditional karate from Japan. He has been living in Italy for more than 40 years now and still have great passion and dedication to his work and way of life, the karate. After all this time his mission is greately accomplished, he manged to transmit the pure spirit and create many good masters to continue the good work after him.
I had the great privilege of being invited to take photos of him by the Accademia del Karate Yoshitaka in Abbiategrasso near Milan, where Shirai sensei regularly hold seminars.
To tak the photo I had only half an hour time with him, early morning in a superb December day in 2011, but at 8 am. there was no light coming from the big windows and I had to set my lights, 4 tungsten spotlights of 350 w. This is why tere is a deep blue windows, I like this effetc. I use a 85mm 1.4f Nikkor lensfully open to achieve a great bochen effect (means shallow focus) is funny to notice that the boken in japanese is the wooden sword used for training in kendo.