The Artful Engineer

Before the blog moves on from Tokyo, I wanted to share some images that are a of a more abstract flavor. It’s fun to exploit buildings with lots of glass, like in the image above, where the left half of the image is filled with reflections of the right half. At this point, four months later, the more I look at this image the more confused I get about exactly what the part of the building on the left actually looked like, so I guess this image is getting more abstract over time, at least for me.

This next nighttime image exploits surfaces which, if they were photographic paper, you would describe as satin finished. At night, Tokyo has so many lights with so many colors that you could spend a lifetime finding little scenes like this.

This next image was not converted to monochrome—it is naturally all whites and blacks and grays. I think this would make nice large print just because of the textures revealed by the hard direct sunlight. Compositionally, I like how the seams in the wall cross in the upper left corner, too; the straight lines contrast with the curves and also take the edge off the large area of negative space. Without those lines crossing there, I think the image would look unbalanced. (I suppose it would be easy enough to remove them in Lightroom—just like power lines—and test this assertion, but taking time to make something I don’t think I’m going to like seems silly at the moment.)

Whereas the preceding image was all-gray, this next one is mostly-gray: there are hints of other colors in various reflected highlights. The entire image is overlaid with reflections, to the point where this image almost feels like a multiple exposure.

These last two images straddle the line between street and abstract photography. In this image, the large area of green reflections is what initially draws the eye. It is out of focus, but enough pattern is evident to give it structure and the wet highlights give it texture. The thing that makes this image, though, is really what you notice later: the walker with the clear umbrella at the top. There is a nice sense of mystery about him, since he is silhouetted, slightly out of focus, and partially blends into the darkness. There are some other umbrella-wielding people in the distant background that are yet more indistinct, but still recognizable. The focus point is interesting here because I focused on the midground and there is fundamentally nothing in the midground. At f/5.6, there isn’t a lot of depth of field at 120mm, so neither of the two primary areas of interest—near and far—are crisply rendered. In this case, I think it works well.

Have I said how much I like the clear umbrellas that are so popular in Japan?

In contrast, this final image is definitely focused on the primary subject: the wet yellow stripes. The people in the background, out of focus and shown only from the waist down, add context and story. I really like the way this image turned out. Rainy evenings in Tokyo are wonderful times to photograph.

Next week the blog heads north to Morioka, the capital city of Iwate Prefecture. I hope you will tag along.

As a reminder for my subscribers who might not often see my homepage, I do post a new image of the week there, every week, at the same time as the weekly blog post. Past images of the week have their own gallery, too, in case you miss some.