Photographing Tokyo, Autumn: Lessons Learned

I pushed myself to take bet­ter pho­tos while I was in Tokyo recently; shoot­ing in the rain while my friends were enjoy­ing hot cof­fee indoors, bruis­ing my feet walk­ing round the streets and over­com­ing my fears to shoot com­plete strangers. I wanted to do bet­ter than I did in 2008, where I shot mostly build­ings on a Tadao Ando pil­grim­age. I wanted to cap­ture a sense of life in Tokyo, and infuse my pho­tos with a sense of story. I’m not sure if I suc­ceeded, but I learned a few lessons from the expe­ri­ence. So if you will, here are lessons learned from the adven­tures of a hob­by­ist photographer.

1. Wear Com­fort­able Shoes

Sounds almost too obvi­ous to be ridicu­lous, but I paid for this les­son dearly with bruised feet that hurt for days after I returned home. See, I like to pack light, and I had to dress for a for­mal occa­sion dur­ing the work/pleasure trip, so smart me decided to pack a sin­gle pair of dress shoes and walk up and down Tokyo in it. Not only did it make walk­ing hell after a cou­ple of days, it impeded my move­ment and my abil­ity to shoot, and I had to rest more as well. Never again!

2. Be Brave/Shameless

Tokyo was the first time I tried street pho­tog­ra­phy, and it was hard for me to over­come the fear/shyness bar­rier to shoot­ing com­plete strangers, unasked, on the streets. A pho­tog­ra­pher I spoke to told me I just had to get over it, and this is some­thing I still need to work on.

3. Cam­era in Hand is Best

Hav­ing a cam­era in the bag is good. Cam­era slung around shoul­der, even bet­ter. Hav­ing the cam­era in hand, hood off, switched on, is best. There were moments that went by so fast, from when I saw them to when I had the cam­era lined up to my eye, that they would have been impos­si­ble to cap­ture if I hadn’t been ready. The shot below would have been impos­si­ble if the cam­era wasn’t in my hands, from the moment I spot­ted the car I had 3 sec­onds to shoot it before it sped off. I missed so many shots with my cam­era tucked away that I pretty much car­ried it in my hands the last cou­ple of days. Was it trou­ble­some? You bet. And it made shop­ping impos­si­ble. But it made all the difference.

4. Don’t Look at the LCD Previews

A cou­ple of pros I met at sep­a­rate occa­sions both advised me not to look at pre­views after shoot­ing. At first I was skep­ti­cal, but I learned it really works. To para­phrase them; it’s bet­ter to keep watch­ing the scene than to watch TV, as you don’t want to give up on a scene until you get home.

Sec­ondly, you got what you got. The shot you took isn’t going to change after you looked at it, if you got it, you got it, if you didn’t, you didn’t. The only excep­tion, I was told, was dur­ing tricky light­ing sit­u­a­tions to check for expo­sure. Oth­er­wise, turn pre­views off and leave the Play but­ton alone.

Last rea­son, and I dis­cov­ered this for myself, it’s real easy for me to get dis­cour­aged. If I pre­view my shots imme­di­ately after and see that they suck, I spi­ral into a hor­ri­ble depres­sion where the evil voice in my head starts going “see? I told you that you were just a hack, you’ll never amount to any­thing, why does your work suck so much etc. etc. etc.” This was a really bad funk to get into, espe­cially see­ing how I needed all the pos­i­tiv­ity I could muster to do bet­ter later in the day.

So, leave the TV off, focus on shoot­ing. Valu­able les­son learned.

5. Shoot Alone

I can’t get into the zone while shoot­ing with other peo­ple. I’ve tried, and I always become a cranky, hor­ri­ble human being when­ever I do. I need the free­dom to do what I need to do, whether it’s jump­ing up onto rail­ings, lying on the ground or spend­ing 30 min­utes just wait­ing, with­out hav­ing to think about other peo­ple. I need to be quiet to focus and get into the scene, and I can’t do that with other peo­ple hang­ing around.

6. Go Where the Story Is

I was won­der­ing about how to shoot pho­tos that tell sto­ries before I left for Japan, and dur­ing my shoot­ing trip I real­ized the obvi­ous: if you want to shoot some­thing inter­est­ing, go where the inter­est­ing things are happening.

7. Lenses are Opportunities

A big duh, but before Tokyo I really hadn’t shot with any­thing much more than a 18-55mm lens. The Canon EOS 7D I bor­rowed came with a kit 18-135mm lens, which opened up an entire new world for me; I real­ized I could shoot so much more with that extra reach. I was lucky enough to bor­row a cou­ple of tele­photo lenses in Tokyo, and those opened up even more shoot­ing opportunities.

8. Luck is Prepa­ra­tion meets Opportunity

I had lots of lucky shots – like the one below, where the birds flew by just as I aimed my cam­era towards the dome. And yet, as much as I can’t dis­count the ele­ment of luck in those shots…I real­ized I’d played as much a part as luck had. I’d walked to that spot, with the inten­tion of cap­tur­ing a good pho­to­graph, done the train­ing for years prior to learn how to use a cam­era and prin­ci­ples of com­po­si­tion, switched it on, lined it to my eye, and looked. If I hadn’t pre­pared, the oppor­tu­nity would have sim­ply come…and gone. It’s good to be lucky, it’s essen­tial to be lucky and prepared.

9. Let it Go

I missed so many more shots than I got. Either the cam­era was in the bag, some set­ting was off, or the moment went by too quick. I had to learn to just let it go, and tell myself to focus not on what I missed, but to focus on what I could still shoot next.

10. 1 in 36

This was some­thing I heard more than a decade ago from my brother’s pho­tog­ra­phy teacher. Back then, we shot in film with rolls of 36, and he told my brother that if he could get just 1 good shot in 36, he could con­sider him­self a good photographer.

I didn’t get it. Isn’t it the mark of a pro that every shot he took would be a great one? I only started to under­stand when I had the chance to look through a highly regarded photographer’s pho­tos, straight off a shoot. I was really sur­prised to see a lot of them sucked. But the ones that were good, were really good.

I shot over 6000 pho­tos dur­ing my 6-day trip, and out of those 6000 there are some that I’m happy with. Out of these, there’s a hand­ful that I’m very happy with, and these are the only ones that I need. When­ever I got dis­cour­aged with crappy results in the field, I just kept telling myself “1 in 36, 1 in 36″ to keep me going. Most of my pic­tures might suck, but I really only need a few to be good.

Related Posts

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