Ichiro Murata

Profile

Born 1964 in Tokyo. Graduated from the Department of Marine Engineering, School of Marine Science and Technology, Tokai University.

While still a student he joined the Takagi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science as an external research student, working on extracting the movement of warm water masses from NOAA weather-satellite thermal infrared imagery. He presented the results at the Television Society of Japan's national convention in 1986. He then spent roughly twenty years at an electronics manufacturer designing ICs for consumer televisions.

He began shooting mountain photography in the 1990s and won the 35th Gakujin Photo Award for 1997. As a member of the Japan Alpine Photographers Association he has shown work in its group exhibitions. He went independent in 2006, and from 2010 expanded into star-landscape photography.

Alongside magazine writing and product reviews, sample images and CP+ talks for PENTAX / RICOH, and teaching photography courses and workshops, he has consistently built the tools that were missing for his own shooting and processing. In the 2000s he released and sold photo software on Vector, and in 2012 a magazine feature published both his compositing method and the program itself. The Sidekick series is a continuation of that habit.

Selected background

Focused on items verifiable from third-party public sources — manufacturers, publishers, the National Diet Library, J-STAGE and Vector. Sources are listed in the next section.