the keitai and the blossoms

at a bridge over the Kanda river, where the cherry blossoms proliferate and swoon, it’s a great photo.
the backlighting is reflected from the screen of her keitai, onto her face and glasses.

Lemon Drops

So here we are on a wet Thursday afternoon. Middle of Golden Week, the national holiday of springtime Japan. It’s chucking it down with rain for the second consecutive day, and it’s my job to entertain & educate my two small boys, and their mates. Let’s have a bit of fun with flash:

We’ll take this PET bottle and cut it roughly in half lengthways. A fishtank would have been better, but we just didn’t have one lying around. We’ll put some towels down on the floor, and another towel on this low table. Lay the bottle on top of the towel, and light. A Nikon SB26 in the front, set to 1/16th power, and a Metz 40MZ in the back, at 1/32nd power. Fill the bottle with water, and find some colourful fruit……

Having these Nanostands makes life quite simple. The Metz in back is fired by a radio trigger, and the SB-26 simply has an integral optical slave unit, which explains a lot of its popularity, I think. In the setup pic above, I put a black poloneck shirt on top of the towel, to try to make the background a more continuous black. We hung a black canvas background behind the set. Much as I would LOVE Black Sabbath curtains, I can’t see the missus going along with it.

Find a willing participant – no shortage of small boys wanting to get wet and lob fruit around. Great! This guy’s even colour-matched his pajamas to the lemon. Take aim, and fire at will:

Missed! No fancy laser beams or sound/light triggers here, just a degree of ever more accurate prediction of impact. Just a fraction of a second later, and I would have nailed it. But the beauty of this little setup is, you can have as much splashy fun as you want. The camera and shutter speed are largely unimportant…….because, as I explained to a group of students last week, the only light in this shot, is coming from the flash. Which is burning for only perhaps 1/2000th of a second. Maybe even less. You just want to make the exposure based only on the flash, ie a low enough ISO, small enough F stop, and high enough shutter speed, to completely exclude available light. All shot at 125 asa(iso), started at 1/800th F5.6, and ended at 1/1250th F8. Just experimenting really. I should add that I shoot with the Nikon D1x, whose flash sync speed is unlimited. Most current cameras can’t sync beyond 1/250th, but with dim available light, that shouldn’t present a problem.

Getting closer

Ah-ha! Perseverance pays off. I’ll own up to being a grumpy old curmudgeon and say now that there are a number of things I’m not happy with – could always use a little bit more depth of field with the water drops, some of the ribs in the PET bottle have distorted the light, there are lots of ways that this could be improved but yes, we had fun, my two sons both have their own DSLR cameras and got involved with shooting, which was half the battle really.

And yes, he really got his teeth into our little project…..still scratching my head about that. Happy trails!

The Main Event

If you live in Tokyo, the impending Tokyo Marathon is just around the corner. It’s a great opportunity to get out in the streets and shoot some pictures. The route passes through quite a wide selection of neighbourhoods, though with a little planning, you can usually get to several different spots during the course of the race. What I generally do, is pre-ride the course, in the week leading up to the event. I’m a big fan of cycling in Tokyo, and usually bike between shooting spots on the day.

As far as equipment goes, I like to pack light. One tele lens, one wide lens, 2 bodies, and a flash. And nothing very extreme either, in terms of the telephoto lens. A lot of people I talk to seem to form the impression that sports photography is always about huge telephoto lenses. I shot the image below on a 180mm lens:

I used a teleconverter with this shot, so the 180mm lens with 1.4x converter about equivalent to a 250mm lens. Adding the crop factor of the DX format camera, about a 375mm in fullframe. The disadvantages are, the AF slows down because of the reduced light into the camera, and the image quality is compromised. With top flight AFS prime lenses, the converter isn’t perhaps so much of a problem, however for the older ‘screwdrive’ lenses I really can’t recommend it.

The Tokyo Marathon bears like every other large city marathon, a number of fancy dress runners. Our Lord Jesus, for example:

Then there’s the Salaryman, every Disney, anime, and cosplay character you can think of,  the list is endless. All richly entertaining, given the often inclement weather.

I’ll be shooting from around sunrise till noon, and you’re welcome to join me if you have a bike to get around on; I’ve got a job to shoot in the afternoon, at the Russian Embassy, so I hope not to get too dishevelled in the morning!

Just Act Polite And Nod

Look, it’s really very simple – there is no ‘maybe’…

 

Ended up shooting these in available light; started off with a softlighter directly overhead on a boom, and slave flash behind. Tried a variety of backgrounds, all of which desparately need ironing – job opportunity if you want it? Finally settled on this hard disk case, which has a nice glossy surface with sandblasted lines. I have fairly good daylight in the studio though 8am in the winter it’s a little on the scarce side. 1/6th second at F4 on a 105 with PK-13 extension ring.

Pinhole Fun.

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I picked up an inexpensive gadget for my Nikon: a pinhole lens. I had intended to use this for a wedding that I was shooting, but the couple decided they didn’t have time to pose in a local park. A great shame. I had pretty much forgotten about this lens, until an acquaintance of mine, English photographer Alfie Goodrich, announced a workshop based around pinhole photography.

What makes a pinhole lens special? Let’s see – it’s taking a trip back in time to the tenth century, recreating those early imaging techniques but with the added value of being able to see the recorded image right away. Stripping cameras back to their bare essentials – and dealing with the problems early photographers faced – long exposure times and images that suffered from poor quality lenses. Wearing the hair shirt, if you like. A little bit of adversity goes a long way.

So I’ve been shooting with my Kenko Pinhole Lens (details in Japanese here)http://www.2dachsies.com/2dachsies.com/Pinhole.html#9

You don’t need to be able to read Japanese to see that this little beauty has an aperture of F250!! – and a field of view approximately equivalent to a 50mm Lens.  Here in the first shot I’m on a 2 second exposure, so holding the camera on the ground kind of makes sense:

Today I took a bike ride to Nakano-ku, and cruising along route 318, got the shot below. Exposure 1/6 second, handheld and riding at about 10km/hour. I’m having a lot of fun with pinhole!

Using the light.

Reflected light

 

There’s a hell of a lot of reflected light available here in Tokyo. Plenty of mirror glass walls, squeaky clean windows, impossibly clean train carriages and commercial trucks. On some clear days, the sun acts like a giant spotlight, falling over a small area of the street, as it’s reflected from a surface on a nearby building. You might have half a second to catch a pedestrian on a crossing, as the light pours onto an area between the 4th and 5th white bars painted on the road surface.

In the late afternoon shot above, the sun is over to the right side, but reflected from the windows of the grimy looking building on the left. As usual, went out with a single prime lens on this day. I find this artificial restriction quite stimulating, in terms of having to think about making different types of images. Used my 300mm F4 lens for this picture.