Photographing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 2

Con­tin­u­ing from Part 1 of my recent pho­to­graphic trip to Tokyo, Japan.

The one day we went out of the city was the one day it kept driz­zling. Instead of being dis­ap­pointed though, I won­dered if I could take advan­tage of the rainy weather. Sure enough, I real­ized that there were many beau­ti­ful col­ors and pat­terns in the umbrel­las that peo­ple were car­ry­ing. In this shot, I love how the color of the umbrella com­ple­ments the color of the tem­ple in the background.

There was a price to shoot­ing in the rain though. I real­ized very soon that I couldn’t shoot hold­ing both an umbrella and a Canon 7D DSLR at the same time, so I aban­doned the umbrella and walked around in the driz­zle, tuck­ing the cam­era into my jacket when­ever I wasn’t shoot­ing. Although it got really cold with the rain and the wind (around 10 degrees Cel­sius), I was more wor­ried about the rain get­ting onto my DSLR than get­ting onto me! The Canon peo­ple assured me that the 7D was weather-proof, but I kept wip­ing rain­drops off as fast as I could.

This is one of my favorite shots taken dur­ing the trip. I was wan­der­ing around the tem­ple grounds when I noticed a spot where a few white birds were hang­ing around. I parked myself there and waited for them to start fly­ing around, which they were quite happy to do every once in a while.

I wanted to achieve two things with these shots; one was to try and pho­to­graph an illus­tra­tion of an idea, instead of sim­ply pho­tograph­ing a pretty pic­ture. Since my sub­ject was birds, I tried to illus­trate the idea of free­dom with this series. The sec­ond thing I wanted to do was to catch the birds against the small tem­ple in the back­ground, so it could pro­vide con­text to the picture.

I shot a lot of pho­tos at this spot, and I could have hap­pily stayed there for the rest of the day just shoot­ing away, try­ing to catch as many deci­sive moments as I could. But unfor­tu­nately I only had 15 min­utes before I had to leave. I got quite a few usable shots in those 15 min­utes though, and I remain con­vinced that I wouldn’t have got­ten as many with­out the quick 8 frames per sec­ond abil­ity of the Canon EOS 7D and a fast San­disk Extreme Pro CF card, both of which I was lucky to get on loan. It really made me under­stand how impor­tant good gear is when you need to place high demands on it.

Most of the shots I took in Japan the pre­vi­ous year were of inan­i­mate objects; archi­tec­ture, inte­ri­ors and still life. I wanted to chal­lenge myself to shoot pho­tos with more emo­tion and life this time round, as well as a more human sense of Japan, so I started to shoot street can­dids. This was some­thing I’d never done before I went on this trip, so it was a real stretch for me!

We were wait­ing for the bus and I noticed the pedes­trian cross­ing ahead would release streams of peo­ple our way every once in a while, so I stood right in the mid­dle of the street, pointed my cam­era for­ward and started shoot­ing away. I was part ner­vous, afraid some­one would scream at me, part embar­rassed, not sure if I was being rude, and part excited, because I was get­ting some really good shots. This was one happy acci­dent that hap­pened (see what I mean by those umbrellas?).

I’m not sure if it’s a cul­tural thing, but I noticed that Japan­ese peo­ple weren’t as adverse to hav­ing their pho­tos taken by ran­dom pho­tog­ra­phers as Sin­ga­pore­ans, in fact some of them were quite game and posed for my cam­era. Maybe look­ing like a tourist helped! In either case, I real­ized that the ins and outs of being a street pho­tog­ra­pher was some­thing I was only begin­ning to learn.

This is another shot I par­tic­u­larly like, and I have to thank Paul-Henri Cahier for the inspi­ra­tion behind it. Before I saw his beau­ti­ful impres­sion­is­tic pho­tographs of the F1 night races, I thought all pho­tographs had to be picture-perfect sharp. The moment I saw this car at the cross­ing, I knew I wanted to try my hand at mak­ing the same effect.

By then, I’d missed too many shots and learned it was much bet­ter to travel with the cam­era in my hands, even if it was cum­ber­some and made me look like a snap-happy tourist. Which was lucky for me, because I prob­a­bly had 3 to 5 sec­onds from the moment I saw this car to when it drove away.

That’s it for Part 2. Look for Part 3 com­ing soon, where I really start explor­ing street pho­tog­ra­phy in the streets of Tokyo, Japan.

Related Posts

1. Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 1
2. Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 5
3. Pho­tograph­ing Tokyo, Autumn: Part 3