Travels

Con­tin­u­ing from Parts 1 & 2 of my recent pho­to­graphic trip to Tokyo, Japan, where I con­tinue my explo­ration of street photography.

After grab­bing a quick break­fast at the con­ve­nience store right next to this junc­tion, I hung around while wait­ing for a call. I noticed the light was lovely that morn­ing, took out my cam­era and started shoot­ing. There’s some­thing I like about this one. Makes me think of my own soli­tary early morn­ing com­mutes to work, feel­ing like the weight of the day ahead was already upon me even before I’d started.

This was shot at another cross­roads, about half an hour later at Omote­sando Street. I spot­ted this beau­ti­ful mother and daugh­ter pair from across the road and snapped a few pho­tos, feel­ing again that mix­ture of excite­ment at get­ting a good shot and ner­vous­ness at dis­turb­ing some­one else’s privacy.

This was a happy acci­dent. I prob­a­bly didn’t think too much of the shot at the time, and only saw this result later back at home. It’s not the best of com­po­si­tions, but I love how the over­ex­posed sky ele­vates the star from a Christ­mas orna­ment to some­thing alto­gether mystical.

Omote­sando Street, if you’re not famil­iar with it, is one of the glitzier shop­ping areas in Tokyo, with high-end bou­tiques and beau­ti­ful shop­ping cen­ters. Its stores are filled with exquis­ite items, which are usu­ally pretty high-priced, and its streets are filled with beau­ti­ful peo­ple – I saw some of the best dressed peo­ple I’ve ever seen here.

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 was in Tokyo a cou­ple of weeks back for a short 6 days. Besides the event I cov­ered for work, I was there for a sec­ond rea­son: to take as many pho­tos as pos­si­ble for future use in the pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tion of the mag­a­zine I write for.

Even though I started with my first man­ual SLR and dig­i­tal cam­era in the late 90s, I hadn’t taken pho­tog­ra­phy seri­ously since I left school. But it’s some­thing I’ve been really get­ting into lately. I pushed myself in Tokyo to take bet­ter pic­tures than I’d taken before, and I’d like to share a few I’m par­tic­u­larly pleased with.

Note: I shot every­thing with a Canon EOS 7D with a kit 18-135mm lens, which was on loan from Canon (and is a dream of a camera).

Chris was our tour guide dur­ing the event days. I first met him last year dur­ing a sim­i­lar trip to Tokyo, he’s from Tai­wan and speaks flu­ent Man­darin, Hokkien, Japan­ese and Eng­lish. A funny guy, and I love the way he was stand­ing in the rain with the twin umbrel­las as he tried to herd us into the bus.

I like this one, but this is one of the rare few shots of archi­tec­ture I shot this time round. Before I left for the trip, I looked through the pho­tos that I’d shot in Tokyo last year, and most of them were of inan­i­mate objects; archi­tec­ture, abstracts and still life. I real­ized that I’d grown used to shoot­ing pho­tos like that and I wanted to chal­lenge myself this time round to shoot differently.