What Light

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’m a few million words in the hole. Check out my Flickr page and you’ll see that I’ve posted more than 3,000 photos in the last nine months, a figure that represents about 25 percent of all the pictures I’ve taken. All this time with my finger poised on the shutter has turned me into an amateur photographer with aspirations. I landed in Sydney armed with a compact Canon PowerShot, a tourist happy to take snapshots. With my newfound aspirations, I now lug around a Canon 400D with an 18-200mm Sigma lens, approaching photography more as an art than a pastime.

Take a look at some of my early shots - strict compositions, level horizons and subjects in crisp focus. The more pictures I took, however, the more I felt constrained by my own rigidity. So I've started to experiment. I feel like a hack, but I think my photography has improved.

I’ve reached the point, perhaps evident in the pictures I’ve posted recently, where I’m more interested in pushing myself as a photographer, in capturing more than a snapshot, in taking risks, blurring images, shooting into the sun, going abstract. It's all about the light. Taking a great photo seems one of the most difficult tasks in the world, a combination of skill, timing and plain dumb luck.

Anyway, while picture is worth a thousand words, it should also be able to speak for itself. Therefore, I offer some of my favorite photos of Tokyo, unadorned by lengthy exposition. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Festival, Shinjuku

Tokyo Tower

Meiji-jingu, Yoyogi

Maman and Mori Tower, Roppongi Hills

Rapper, Shibuya

Wonder Wheel, Odaiba

Ghibli Museum, Mitaka

Graffiti, Kichijoji

Taxis, Omotesando

Girl at Senso-ji, Asakusa

Packaged Fish, Ueno

Goth, Harajuku

More than 200 additional images from Tokyo, here and here.