The Artful Engineer

Lots of my friends have never been to Tokyo, so naturally they ask me what I thought. A week in Tokyo hardly makes me an expert, but is long enough to have formed some lasting impressions. One general comment is that Tokyo is not a tall city. Tokyo feels more like a five- or six-story sprawl and, while there are some skyscrapers, they are relatively localized in a few areas. One of those areas—which also has the highest concentration of them—is Shinjuku.

The NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building, above, is especially beautiful in the blue-hour image above. It is the focal point, but this is more of an environmental portrait supported by the building on the left and the subway platform below. And, of course, a cameo appearance by the moon. I wish now that I had taken a quick second shot exposed for the moon: even though—not having a tripod handy—the framing would have shifted, swapping the properly exposed moon into the image would have been easy. I’ll put that in the lessons-learned pile for next time, but I don’t think it detracts from the image regardless. That said, on a large print, it might, and I’d be tempted to just remove the moon altogether in that case.

The unusual curved outline of the Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower is the obvious star of this next image, with the other two—rather pedestrian—buildings just providing context and contrast.

I will confess that my rendition of the Yasuyo Building, next, is one of countless similar ones online. I had only seen one image of this building, I believe, before bumping into it. It’s pretty neat when lit up at night. The fact that something designed and built in the late 1960s is not a putrid eyesore makes this structure especially unique. Regardless of the fact that this image did not end up being particularly—well, let’s be honest, not even remotely—unique doesn’t make me like it less, but does make me want to try harder next time. That is one of the challenges of photographing in an entirely new place, especially an over-stimulating one like Tokyo: your first image of something is probably the most obvious and, despite that, feels fresh and original to you, but it isn’t. Of course, we were also walking to meet one of my daughter’s friends for dinner, so I could only lag so far behind the group. As it was, this image is the only one I made of this building, so it is hard to be disappointed in it. The building is kind of wedged in a corner between two others, so there is only a little over 90° worth of available perspectives; it will take some cleverness to come up with something unique, and I am willing to bet that 120mm will not be the right focal length to do it with. Unless…ICM, maybe? Or shooting through something else, like a tree? I’m not sure, so I will log it as a challenge for next time.

This next building, the Fuji Soft Building, is in Akihabara rather than Shinjuku like the rest. I now always title my images before I post them, if for no other reason than making comments is a lot easier if you can use the image’s title rather than having to describe it as the one with all the curved orange windows. That said, I don’t much care for the title I came up with, so if you would like to start your comment with “I think you should have titled the one with all the curved orange windows as ——”, I will happily consider your suggestion. The picture has a bit of an threatening feel to it, so something that works along those lines gets extra credit.

When it was time to title this next one, I just kept thinking of Spongebob. Considering I have seen all of 10 seconds of Spongebob in my life, I still think it permanently knocked my IQ down 10%. The fact that such an insipid thing came to mind from this image—an image I am really happy with—is compelling evidence of long-term cognitive damage from that waiting-room torment.

As a hedge against getting repetitive, I always like to mix of the scales of images in a set. This group is biased towards full-length portraits, as it were, of buildings, but this one is a tight view of patterns and lights and reflections, all in a narrow color palette with high contrast.

This final image is unconventional. The big black vertical void right down the center of the image is risky, compositionally, but I think it works. The bright blue attracts the most attention, but the weird round structure in the lower right provides some competition. Also, the brightest part of the image is the latticed windows on the right, which get an echo of support from the reflections on the far left. There’s enough stuff happening on both sides of this image that the black divide doesn’t seem to slow the eye down much. Without the ball on the lower right encroaching into that space, though, it might be a different story.

Thanks for visiting! I would love to hear your comments on any (or all!) of these images. Photographing skyscrapers at night is a real treat for me, so I am excited that I was able to share some of these with you this week.

But you knew that I couldn’t stay away from more—shall we say—downtrodden structures for long, though, right?