One of the photographs in Akira A. Ruiz's latest Main Street show offers a glimpse at the Island's surprisingly strong link to the world of hip-hop.

The photo, of four young men in a rap group pose, was taken on the roof of DJ Honda's recording studio in downtown Manhattan.  It was part of a commercial shoot for Honda, a hip-hop producer and entrepreneur, and represents the professional direction Ruiz wants to go with his photography: celebrities, entertainment magazines, possibly even filmmaking.

Ruiz is 22 years old and has lived on Roosevelt Island for about nine years.  It was his mother's idea to move here from the East Village, where he grew up, he said.  His mother, Toshiko Kitano, a painter and artist's agent, wanted him to be closer to the High School of Art and Design on Second Avenue, only two blocks south of the tram.

The choice proved to be a good one for another reason.  "This is like a photographer's dream out here," he said, referring to the landscape shots that dominated his previous show in the Westview window next to the bank.

Ruiz majored in photography in his last two years of high school, graduating in 1996.  He took a year off, then entered the School of Visual Arts, on 23rd Street.  Only five months away from getting his college degree, he is busy exhibiting his work, networking with magazine editors and other potential customers, and sprucing up his portfolio.And he's always looking for pictures: "I have this special camera that I have on me 24/7, it's at my waist, so if my friends fall on the floor, I catch 'em: It's like, I got that!"

Ruiz's subjects often are his friends on the Island, who willingly take part in his photo shoots along the shoreline and at other sites.  "Usually when I shoot it's all spontaneous, so that the idea will come to me even if I have a location in mind already," he said.  His compositions, however, can be elaborate in their mood and lighting, and he devotes a lot of work in the darkroom to adjusting the color and making his prints.

The technical challenges are most apparent in some of Ruiz's landscapes, which capture moments when the Upper East Side's combination of water, sky and towers is at its most dramatic.  At twilight, looking out from his apartment, he said, "I get the view straight from here so I know exactly when it's happening; it's when the sun just goes down you get that little purple tint in the clouds, that's when I start getting ready.  I'm out there at that time, getting ready to shoot."

Ruiz is a night owl, and some of the photos were taken at 2 a.m., with a full moon behind high clouds, and his subject in the foreground illuminated with a flash.  Some of the photos required long exposures.  Others were made with a panoramic camera he rented, a Noblex, which has a swing lens capable of duplicating a person's field of vision.  Thus, he could get a shot from the Red Bridge that sweeps along the shore all the way to the Queensboro Bridge.  The tough part of that shot, he said, was bringing the Island's buildings out of deep shadow.

The ability to create these images comes from school.  Ruiz's artistic roots run deeper, to an unusual ethnic combination.  He calls himself Japorican, reflecting his mother's Japanese ancestry and that of his father, Federico Ruiz, Puerto Rican.  He said his parents separated when he was 2; his mother is remarried, to the lawyer Philip Groner.  The elder Ruiz, who lives in Newburgh, is a sculptor and formerly was the operations director at the Museo del Barrio on Fifth Avenue.  Ruiz had a chance to be a jack-of-all-trades there with his father.  Not only are his parents artists, but his uncle is, as well.  Yasuhiro Kitano's paintings hang in a number of collections in the United States and Japan.  He preceded his nephew as a Main Street exhibitor.

DJ Honda, known as Japan's top disc jockey, is from Hokkaido, and was runner-up in the 1992 DJ Battle for World Supremacy contest in the United States, according to the biography on his Web site.  He has since gone from being a so-called underground hip-hop turntablist to a record producer and retailer, and his signature calligraphic "h" is prominent in Ruiz's rooftop photo.  Ruiz met him right here on Roosevelt Island, where DJ lived for a time, Ruiz said.  Black Attack and Problemz, who posed for the studio shot, and who appeared on DJ's first two albums, also lived on the Island, he said.  On tour, they performed as Missing Linx.  The culture of hip-hop, as DJ Honda has said, has expanded far from U.S. shores.

Thus the young photographer has his sights set high.  Perhaps not as high as DJ Honda, who aspires to be "a household name worldwide," according to his Web biography But, as Akira Ruiz said, "Photography paves the way for many things."