My morning run route takes me through some rice fields near our house. Yesterday, just after sunrise, I noticed some delicate dew drops on the rice plants catching the morning sun. It was beautiful.

So this morning I went back with my camera. I left the house around 5am, a little before sunrise, and shot as the sun was coming up. My first few shots were before sunrise, and needed ISO 2000 to get decent exposure. But as the sun came up I backed down to ISO 400 and got a few decent shots. Enjoy!

A couple days later I took a 6am bullet train out of Tokyo to meet Jason and May in Kyoto. We spent the day touring several historical locations in the city. First we visited Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) to see the 1000 Torii Gates. I’m told there are actually more than 1000, but I didn’t count. In fact we walked for an hour and didn’t even get to the end!

The next location on our agenda was the Sagano Bamboo Forest (嵯峨竹林), just north of the Tenryu Temple. Tenyru means “heavenly dragon” in Japanese. The bamboo forest is the largest I’ve ever seen, and is famous for good reason. The forest is preserved by harvesting just enough bamboo to keep the plants from choking each other.

Our next stop was the famous Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺), or the Golden Pavilion, a Zen Buddhist temple that is plated with gold. The weather was perfect and I got several good shots of the temple. It’s a little challenging to make an original photo of Kinkaku-ji because there’s really only one angle that is much worth shooting. I didn’t have my circular polarizer so I had some difficulty with the very wide dynamic range in the scene. I ended up processing several of the photos to HDR later with fairly good results.

After Kinkaku-ji, we took a taxi to Ishibe Kouji (石壁小絽) in the Gion area of Kyoto. The taxi driver proudly pointed out the various landmarks we passed on the way. It turned out that he was also a avid photographer and he gave us two of his own photos!

Ishibe Kouji is one of the most “Kyoto-looking” areas of Kyoto and features narrow stone streets with old wooden Japanese buildings on both sides. We got there just as the sun was beginning to set. I was excited spend “golden hour” shooting in such a great spot. I mounted a Canon 430EX and a 70cm white bounce umbrella onto a monopod and used the ST-E2 to trigger the flash for some very nice portraits as night fell.

Overall, it was a great day of shooting and I’m very happy with the results. I made made a few stupid technical mistakes and lost a few images, but still got enough good ones that the couple was happy with their pictures. And that’s all the really matters right?

I recently had the pleasure of shooting engagement photos for Jason and May, a wonderful couple who visited Japan from Singapore.

We spent one day in Tokyo Disneyland, and one day in Kyoto. In Disneyland my job was mainly to follow them around and document their day, without getting in the way.

They had one specific request: a photo of them together, underneath the fireworks. Ouch. I did some research and found that this would be a difficult photo to make. First of all, Disney doesn’t allow tripods, or even monopods, in the park. Second, I couldn’t think of a good way to get enough depth of field for a couple in the foreground and fireworks in the background.

In the end, I cheated. When the fireworks started I propped the camera on top of my bag and did several one-second exposures of the fireworks display, hoping to get a good one. When it was over I shot a few frames of the couple from about the same camera angle, using an on-camera 430EX speedlite to light them. A few minutes in Photoshop, and poof! Disney Magic.