Will Robb Photography

Today was another beautiful day in Tokyo and I headed down to Asakusa, one of Tokyo’s downtown areas that still clings to an older way of life. At the center of Asakusa lies sensoji temple, one of the main temples in Tokyo. At this time of year it’s absolutely mobbed with people visiting the temple to offer their first (and sometimes only) prayers for the year. There is a 300 m path leading to the temple and around this time of year you have to join the crush of people queuing to enter the temple. It can take more than an hour from the end of the queue to actually get inside. I’m glad I’ve seen it before.

At the moment the main temple building is under repair and isn’t worth photographing, but as the weather was beautiful and I was anticipating a brilliant dusk, I decided to make a point of photographing the pagoda that is in the grounds of sensoji. During the day it is very nice, but at night it comes into it’s own when it is lit up and on a nice night like tonight’s it’s absolutely stunning. Due to the New Year festivities there were a lot of food stalls in the grounds, lots of people with their families taking up most of the space, so it took me a while to find a good clear spot to get my tripod out and get some shots. The pagoda in it’s entirety is gorgeous, but I found myself more drawn to the details of the pagoda which looked amazing with the dusk sky in the background. I shall include an example of both here, for each I used a long exposure, about 10 seconds with a small f. stop (f.16) with an iso of 100 to bring out the details nicely.

Also, I’ve been talking about videos for a while that I can shoot with my EOS 5D mk II, so I decided to upload some of the same place to give an idea of what you can do with canon’s new HD video functions. I am no videographer, but I am enjoying taking a few videos each time I go out. I have been taking some ever since I got the camera, but I find the internal mic picks up a little noise from the internal working of the lens rotors when you manually adjust focus, also, when outside the wind sounds really bad, so I haven’t been uploading any videos yet. However, recently I bought an external mic and I find it really helps a lot. When I get home I hook my camera up to the TV to check out the photos and videos and it looks great, I am still a real beginner for editing videos though and all I managed to do was upload the images to youtube and then embed them here. This year I plan on learning how to edit properly.