My favorite seasons for photographing the Japanese landscape are autumn and spring. I prefer the the richer colours, of course, but I also like the more oblique lighting conditions you generally get no matter what the time of day.

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.)

This shot (click here) at sunset of a rice paddy on a cliff overlooking the ocean was taken on the Noto Peninsula (能登半島）, which is located on the Sea of Japan in the prefecture of  Ishikawa-ken (石川県). Noto is one the most picturesque areas along the western seaboard, rich in variety of coastal and mountain scenery. Its history is also fascinating; for example, the kitamaebune (北前船) trading vessels made frequent use of ports such as Wajima (輪島) as they traveled between the Setonaikai (瀬戸内海) and Ezo (蝦夷), making the region a focus of not only commerce but also cultural exchange. Once of the most famous scenes in the region is the “senmaida” (千枚田) rice paddies. (Click here if you want to see a picture of ”senmaida” in my International University of Japan Japanese landscape photography gallery.)

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.)

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.