かやぶき屋根の民家

In the old days, the prefecture of Niigata (新潟） was referred to as Echigo (越後). I lived for many years in Nagano (as you may know if you read my other posts) which is directly adjacent to Niigata. I also spent two years studying at the International University of Japan (IUJ, or 国際大学 as it is known in Japanese), which gave me even more opportunity to get to explore and photograph the landscape of this fascinating  area. It is famous for it koshihikari rice, hotsprings, and beautiful mountain and coastal scenery. (Coming from British Columbia with the mountains and ocean, Niigata feels familiar.) Niigata has traditionally had an image as one of the isolated back-country regions of Japan (uranihon, 裏日本）. It is incorrect, actually, to think of Niigata as having been somehow cut off from  ”civilization”; it, along with other supposed isolated areas such as the Noto peninsula (能登半島） had much mercantile and cultural contact with other regions in Japan and mainland Asia due to the sea trade routes.

Niigata is also historically known as “snow country” (雪国) due to the massive amount of snow the cold winds from Siberia bring down onit. Dealing with the snow has had a strong influence on the people of Niigata — on their character and their lifestyle. One interesting physical manifestation of this is how the traditional homes were built — with doors on two stories, one for the summer on the ground floor and one on the second floor for access when the snow piled 2 or 3 metres high (it does — I have dug myself out of it).

The tiny thatched roof house or kayabukiyane no minka (かやぶき屋根の民家) in this scene is to be found in the charming mountain village of Matsunoyama (松之山）, which  these days is known for being one of the few remaining areas with a high concentration of thatched-roof dwellings. Throughout the country, such traditional thatched-roof dwellings are fast disappearing, either being covered in metal or being torn down and rebuilt entirely. It is a shame, because these farmhouses (the design of which is distinctive to each region of Japan) are one of the most charming aspects of the man-made landscape.

This picture was taken on a brilliant morning while driving from Nagano to Yamato-machi; after a heavy overnight snow fall, I knew taking a slight diversion through Matsunoyama would afford some great picture opportunities. I had passed by this scene several times before during different times of day during different seasons. This was the first time to see it blanketed in snow. The composition with my 180 lens was pretty straightforward. I took a few shots with the camera tilted a little lower but I prefer this framing, with a little bit of the top of the mountain showing to provide context.

The trickiest part of this shot was the exposure. Snow at the best of times can be difficult because of the reflection; however, this shot was complicated by the top-back-side light. I took reflective reading off several parts of the scene and calculated an average. I compared this average to a reading based on the incident light meter held at and angle to to simulate the angle of the sun. With the Sekonic 308, you can retract the white hemisphere into the unit, so I took another reading to simulate the shadow incident reading. After taking all these readings, I found a kind of overall average and then adjusted for gut-feeling. Aperture was at f16, and shutter speed at 1/60.

I did not use any filters. The blue cast is mainly from the high colour temperature of the light in the shadows. I find the blue cast from Kodak Ektachrome the most pleasing of all the films, and usually only use Ektachrome in the winter, as opposed to Fuji Velvia the other seasons.

As a postscript, I am sad to say when I visited this scene again not too long ago in the spring I found that the farmhouse had been ripped down. I remember when I first started taking pictures of this scene, I would often see a single elderly lady tending to the adjacent garden. Winter on her own must have been very difficult, having to deal with clearing the roof of snow. Many of the elderly are vacating such dwellings to live in more convenient communal dwellings closer to towns. I don’t blame them. But it is a waste that the dwellings are torn down. I know of several foreigners that make a living renovating such farmhouses into attractive homes. For some reason, the Japanese seem  to be less interested in keeping this part of their cultural heritage alive.

This photo was taken in the prefecture of Nagano (長野） in early May, just after rice planting, near the tiny mountain village hotspring of Takazawa　（高沢）. I had just been driving through the Utsukushigahara (美ヶ原） highlands when I received an e-mail from the office that I had to sit in on an important telephone conference.  I had to quickly come down from around 2000 meters into the valley where my cellphone would pick up the signal. I was racing — while lamenting over the fact that I would miss watching the sunrise from Utsukushigahara as the call was scheduled for around that time.

To cut time I took a shortcut — an old mountain road that I had not been on since living in Ueda (上田) in the early ’90s. I had completely forgotten how isolated this area was, how much old-world scenery it still retained. I passed by several thatched-roof  ”kayabukiyane” （茅葺屋根 ) farmhouses, several idyllic  hamlets perched over the valley and many tiered rice paddies.

Racing along, I could not help but notice over my right shoulder the scene you see here with the flowers in the foreground and the lines of seedlings being lit from behind, a little to the side. It was perfect light that brought out the fresh bright green of the “nae” （苗）.

Risking to miss my important call I quickly pulled the car over and got to work setting up my tripod and Hasselblad. A farmer sitting off to the side looked on in amusement at this foreigner frantically grappling with all his gear.

I used a 180 lens, so the issue with this shot, given that I was shooting from an angle above the paddy, was the depth of filed — the area in focus both in front of and behind the focal point. I stopped down the lens to f32, and, using the old panorama focus technique (which you can’t do on the modern Digital camera lenses!!), aligned the infinity mark of the focusing ring to the f32 mark on the aperture ring, thus bringing everything within 7 meters and infinity in focus. Perfect.

Next, metering. As I was standing in the exact same light at the subject, and there were not any challenging conditions such as clouds or nasty reflections, I used incident metering, tilting the white sphere of the meter slightly toward me to simulate the angle the the sunlight was hitting the seedlings from behind. Just to be sure, I spot metered, but it turned out the incident metering was perfect. Actually, I use incident metering quite a lot in landscape photography if the lighting conditions of where I am standing and the subject are the same. Good sunny days are easy. On overcast days, a trick I learned from a Japanese photographer is to point the white semi-sphere to the sky and then increase the reading by a stop. That always works well for me.

I took 2 or 3 shots, the last on that roll and then hurriedly started to pack my gear so I could get going again and make my call.

And then it happened.

As I always do immediately after finishing a roll of film,　I began to take the roll out of the magazine so as to have ready for the next new roll.  However, in my half excitement (“Oh, this shot is going to turn out great!”), half-haste (“My boss is going to kill me!”), I neglected to roll the film forward completely on to the pick-up spool — and as I took the film out of the magazine, I realized that I had exposed the last few shots to the sunlight! The best ones!!!

I don’t remember if that farmer was still there, but he must have been doubly amused to see this foreigner, now, just minutes later, cussing streams of all obscenities imaginable to the valley winds.

Ahh, such is life.

No choice — I quickly loaded a new film an shot the whole roll (12) just to make sure.  Camera off  the mount, tripod folded (again, in excitement and haste, fingers pinched between the metal legs and more obscenities　– what was this farmer thinking?), in the car, in gear and — vroom — racing again to get into cell phone range.

Usually, photography is a more deliberative, meditative process for me. It makes no sense to me to hurry hurry hurry to “get the shot”. Photography for me is more about the process than the end result. But sometimes, when pressed for time but you just know the shot is a winner, you throw all that away and just go for it. I prefer the more leisurely pace, but I am glad I pulled over that day. Must have made that farmer’s day, too.

This scene (click here) was taken in late November in the foothills of the Japan Alps, also known as the Kita Alps (北アルプス, meaning “North Alps”) . The location is the village is Miasa (美麻) and it’s on the road between the city of Nagano (長野) and the village of Hakuba (白馬).

Some of you will recall that Nagano was the site of the 1998 Winter Olympics; events were spread out throughout the prefecture, with slalom and snowboarding in Shigakogen (志賀高原), curling in Karuizawa (軽井沢), cross-country in Nozawa spa (野沢), skating and hockey in Nagano city, and the major downhill events as well as biathlon and ski jumping in Hakuba. I was actually working for the organizing committee at that time, responsible for the men’s ice hockey event. (I think my assignment definitely had something to do with the fact I was Canadian).

Last year, I was driving in the early afternoon on the way to the Sea of Japan from Nagano to shoot some scenes along the coast — but as I got closer to Hakuba and caught a glimpse of the white mountains against the blue sky, my heart started to race and I decided to make a detour up into the hills behind Miasa. At this slightly higher elevation (around 300 metres above the main road) I could enjoy this gorgeous view.

The mountains in the background, Kajimayarigatake (鹿島槍ヶ岳) and Goryu (五竜) are just under 3000 metres, which is why they are capped in freshly white snow — the cold Siberian winds start to whip across the sea at this time of year bringing the white stuff down at that altitude. You can’t see the lower parts of the valley from this view, but there would still be patches of green here and there. This combination of white + autumn orange + green is referred to by the Japanese as “sandankoyo” (三段紅葉), meaning “three layers of autumn colours”. Landscape photographers across Japan flock to areas where these conditions often occur, such as Niigata, Nagano, Toyama and Fukushima.

What can I say — how do you NOT take a great picture with these conditions? It is all there in front of you! I guess the main points to think about are:
- metering (of course, as always)
- desired composition (which informs choice of lens)
- and, based on composition and choice of lens, depth of field issues

As far as metering goes, the main issue here is to make sure that the scene is properly exposed so as not to burn out the white (and thus the mountains’ texture) but at the same time not underexpose and thus lose the details of the darker areas of lower part of the frame. I spot-metered the snow with my trusty hand-held Sekonic to get a feeling what I had to start with, and then took various readings on the orange and sky. Actually, being autumn, with all the orange in the foreground and the strong, unobstructed light coming from the sun from about 10 o’clock just behind my left shoulder, the brightness was evenly balanced across the entire composition. It would have been tricky in summer, for example, if the foreground had been a dark green; then, without a neutral density filter, I probably would have lost more details in the darker areas.

By the way, some of you might wonder why I start with metering before composing the shot. Actually, this is always the way I do it. I think many photographers make the mistake of painstakingly trying to compose the frame before getting a good sense of the range of light intensity in scene. You need to first determine what elements are within an acceptable range  (usually 5 stops or so for slide film, or 7 for negative film — digital, from what I can seen is also around 7 but weaker in the darker ranges) before committing to including those elements in your picture. So before I even bother to look through the viewfinder, I usually spend a few minutes spot metering with the hend-held Sekonic just to get a sense of what is going to work exposure-wise. When I met Charlie Waite, the famous English landscape photographer whom I really admire and in whose work I find a lot of inspiration, who was in Japan several years ago, one of the best tips he gave me was that one has to “see” the picture in the mind before even thinking about depressing the shutter. I think that (“instant confirmation  / gratification” digital photography aside) this is what attaining the highest level of skill in photography is all about– being able to see and predict exactly how a scene will be rendered (on film) before even taking your camera out of the bag.

So with these balanced lighting conditions, I was pretty well free to compose as I wanted. The issue with composition in this case was not to get too excited by the beauty of the scene and overly anxious to cram everything in — or, on the other hand, to slap a telephoto on and just take a tight-cropped shot of the mountains against the sky. No, too mundane.

Too much or too little — always the same challenge.

I needed some kind of focal point. I just stood there for a few minutes with my hands in my pockets, looking around, taking in the fresh air and the sun. I eventually found it in the middle of the rice paddy just below the road: the wooden racks on which harvested rice is hung to dry. To frame that in the foreground somehow with the alps in the background, I had to go with the standard 80mm lens (remember, I am shooting in 6×6 medium format).

To ensure maximum depth of field (i.e. the range within focus from front to back), I focused on the rack and stopped right down to f22 (which gave me a shutter speed of 1/60, I recall). If I had focused on the background, the foreground would have definitely gone soft, even stopped down.

Just for reference, I did experiment with other focal length lenses. I composed a few shots with the wide angle 50mm, which allowed me to get in even closer to the rack and achieve an even wider depth of field – but then the alps became too small in the background. Moreover, I increased the distance between the rack and the camera and composed with a medium telephoto (180 mm) and could achieve a similar frame, BUT then it was not possible to bring both foreground and background into focus at the same time.

Well, that’s what ended up happening, anyways:　I shot a couple of rolls of film from different angles and different focal length combinations. The more I walked around and took in the scene, the more compositions and varying themes came into my view (eye and mind). It became a great photo study of the interplay between this distinct, uniquely Japanese man-made landscape ornament, and one of the most spectacular backdrops to be found anywhere in the country.

Needless to say, I never made it to the Sea of Japan that day. A couple of hours passed before I knew it, so, with the coast still a two-hour drive away and with no chance of making it in time for the sunset, I headed for a nearby, secluded mountain outdoor hotspring (露天風呂, “rotenburo”) and relaxed in the steaming water under the fading alpine dusk light.

(For more pictures of my photography in the mountains of central Japan, please check out my gallery in the excellent ski and other winter sports website Snow Japan.)

The scene is in early May, which is suggested by the recently planted rice seedlings just breaking through the surface of the water. The silhouette on the far edge of to the paddy is what the harvested rice is hung on to dry in the fall. It is late in the day while driving between Wajima and Monzen (門前) — probably the best time to be driving along the west coast if you enjoy sunset and silhouette imagery, because scenes like this pop out at you endlessly. It is almost impossible to concentrate on the road; luckily the area is very remote so there is almost no traffic, and you can crawl along and take it all in.

If you roll your cursor over the image, you will see that I took this picture on my Hasselblad with an 80 mm lens. I was kind of rushing when I took this (to keep going and take in other scenery before the sun slipped behind the horizon), so I quickly set up the tripod on the edge of the paddy and hastily framed the shot looking through the finder. The way I focused, however, was not looking through the finder but by stopping the lens down to f22 and aligning the infinity mark on the focusing ring with the aperture mark. This way I could focus on the light and metering the scene properly. I use this focusing technique a lot with broad compositions and when pan-focus is appropriate.

You may be tempted to think I used a filter or played around with the colour after scanning. Not at all. The original slide looks exactly like this. Given the lighting conditions and the haze in the early evening sky, I knew that I could achieve a really saturated colour by under-exposing just a little (or, to look at it from a different point of view, by exposing for the highlights). I did this by spot metering with my hand-held meter on the surface of the rice paddy half-way between the left edge of the frame and where the sun is reflecting on the water. I double-checked my reading on several other areas of the paddy and the sky to make sure everything was within an acceptable range of brightness. If there had been less haze in the sky, there would have been more contrast between the really bright areas and the really dark areas of the scene, and I could not have achieved such even colour and detail. The conditions (for me) were perfect, actually.

It was difficult to leave this spot — it wasn’t just the beautiful view, it was also the croaking of the frogs in the rice paddy, the fresh breeze coming off the ocean and the total feeling of tranquility that made it such a special place. But other parts of the coast further south beckoned, so within 10 minutes the gear was back in the car and I was off again. This is the dilemma I face doing landscape photography in Japan — sometimes I just don’t get enough time to savor it all there on the spot — there is too much to see. Luckily, during this trip to Noto, I was camping on the shore with my brother visiting from Canada. We had several days to relax and take it all in. (It’s in Japanese, but check out this site for further scenes from Noto.)

This photo (click here), the top of a shrine against a blue sky, was taken at the peak of Mt. Norikura (乗鞍岳） in the early summer.

Norikuradake is located right on the border between Nagano and Gifu prefectures, at the southernmost part of the Kita Alps (“north alps”). If I am not mistaken, the name comes from its saddle-like shape. From the surrounding highlands such as Kaidakogen (開田高原) further to the south, I think it has one of the prettiest profiles of all the mountains I have seen — especially at dusk if viewed from the old Nomugi-toge （野麦峠） pass road.

It is an easy peak to access. When I took this picture, I had left Yokohama in the early evening, arriving in Nagano around ten, where I borrowed a car, driving on through Matsumoto and arriving at the base approach around midnight. I remember that night — sleeping in the car and looking at the stars which were unbelievably bright at that altitude. From there, it was only about a two hour hike to peak. I took many photos that morning, but this is one of my favorites.

It was already “late” (around 8:00, and mountain photographers know what I mean), and the lighting was changing constantly because of the clouds being whipped across the summit by the wind. There were only a handful of hikers up there, so it was very peaceful and quiet. I knew all along that framing the roof of the shrine would make a good shot — it was just a matter of waiting for the sun to break through the clouds and throw light on the foreground, and to time it so there was some interesting cloud formation in the background.

Metering was not difficult. I used a hand-held incident reading in front of the shrine, and spot-metered the sky just to be sure.

The main point about this shot is the lens work. If you rolled over your cursor on the image, you will have seen that I shot it with my Hasselblad and a 50 mm wide-angle lens, hand-held. I read all the time that you “can’t” shoot medium format without a tripod, but I do often with my 50 mm lens. I love that lens — I think it is perfect for hand-held work. In any case, I had no choice. To get the composition I wanted, I needed to climb up the side of wall of loose rock that had been piled about shoulder high around the shrine to protect it from the elements. I could not have used a tripod even if I wanted. (I almost did not get to take this picture. When the kaminushi — 神主 or shrine priest — heard me scrambling around on the rock, he came out from inside the shrine and was mightily irate with me…). So hand-held it was, making maximum use of the wide angle lens’ depth of field — stopping it down to f22, which still gave me a shutter speed of 1/125 — more than enough for a hand held shot.

No filter — not even a polarizer. I was tempted use one, to really punch out the blue. But underexposing half a stop was enough. The Fuji Velvia 100 did its job. (My further thoughts on filter technique found here.)

I like the gorgeous blue contrasted against the sun-bleached silvery wood of the shrine. (If you look closely at the wood, you can see that the grain really stands out. This is from the “sand blasting” effect of the dirt and wind at that altitude.) It could be a mountain peak anywhere in the world, but　of course with the shrine profile it says “Japan”. There is also a nice sense of altitude, I think, because of the hint of the highlands below.

First, I should mention that most of the photographs I have initially selected for the current four albums in my gallery are from an exhibition I held recently in Yokohama and Kobe. The great people at Patagonia made the exhibition possible — twenty three of my photographs were on display in two stores for most of June and early July.

The common underlying theme of all of these photos is that I took them while travelling along the ancient Japanese kaido (街道) roads in Shinshu　（信州）, Echigo （越後）, Echizen (越前) , and Echu (越中）.  (I would like to talk about the “kaido” in a later post — they are a fascinating way in which to understand better the Japanese topography, ethnology and history.

A few words about the technical aspects of the images.

These are all shot on slide film — mostly Fuji (Vevia 50 and 100, and Fortia, which appears to be available only in Japan); I sometimes use Kodak Ektachrome in winter. Generally, I do not shoot negative film, although I do have some black and white work I would like to post in the gallery at a later date.

The flip side of this as that none of the images here are digital, nor have they been digitally altered. I may need to tweak the saturation or contrast a little, but this is only to get the scans as close as possible to the orginal slides. I am against digitally altering photographs. I don’t see the point; I am trying to capture on film what moves me as I really see it with my own eyes, not create an idyllic memory of it. (More on this topic later, too…)

As a rule, I don’t use filters. The only exceptions are, depending on weather and lighting conditions, I may use a polarizer filter, a half neutral density filter, and/or if appropriate, a light-balancing filter to compensate for light-temperature related colour shift. I talk a little about my “filter philosophy” at this post. And anyways, filters get in the way of the brilliant optics of the Carl Zeiss lenses I use.

Unlike examples of my work you might find on-line elsewhere , which is mostly shot in 35 mm format, the focus of what I want to showcase here has been shot in medium format (6 x 6). The subject matter and style is subtley different, I think, than what I do in 35 mm format. I would like to talk about the interesting differences between 35mm and 6 x 6mm in a later post. For reference, I use a Hassleblad 503 cxi and three lenses: 50mm, 80mm and 180mm. I sometimes use a 2x teleconverter.

As you can see, there are four albums in the gallery, which you can move between by clicking on the little icon in the lower left hand corner (some people miss this). If you roll your cursor over the image, photo data will cascade down from the top of the image. I have not finished adding all the data, but will update as time permits.

I hope I have answered some of the questions you have been thinking about — most of the above is based on what people ask me. Feel free to submit any questions or comments you have!

In the years I have been doing photography professionally, I have worked across a wide range of genres: sports and event-related photography for the 1998 Nagano Winter Games (where I did work for the International Winter Olympic Committee, official sponsors, the media, including Sports Illustrated), the usual “travelogue” type stuff for Japanese and international publications, and the Yokohama Trade and Convention Bureau; and even portfolio photography for a Japanese model agency. I have had several exhibitions in Japan, and you can even see an enlargment of one of my images (the Yokohama skyline) on permanent display in the Shintakashima subway station on the Minatomirai line.

Much of the work I have published previously was either commissioned work, or work around a specific theme related to a projects’ needs. But on this site, I want to showcase images whose themes I have a particularly strong connection. The stuff on this website has more personal meaning for me. The work I would love to blow up and exhibit if I had deep enough pockets!

It’s not really a site about photography, actually. It is actually about my passion for the Japanese landscape. I have been exploring and absorbing the incredibly richly textured beauty of this land for over 18 years. ( I have 6 or 7 thousand images in my portfolio.) As I mention in my About section, I would rather paint, but since I have no talent for that, photography becomes my default format for capturing and expressing what I see in my travels.

So this is what I want to share with you: my love of the Japanese landscape. Hopefully, you will see a side that you normally don’t see in the usual travel brochures.

I am just in the process of developing this blog. Please explore some of the posts and feel free to leave a comment.

I hope you enjoy this small sample of my photography of the Japanese landscape.