去年の成人の日、「三十三間堂大的全国大会」の撮影。14ヶ月遅いですが、この記事の続きです。

As I seem to do more often than not, I never did follow up on an early-2015 blog post that I intended to be just an introduction. In January 2015 I posted “The 2015 Young-Adult Archery Event at the Sanjusangendo Temple” with a few pictures and a “To be continued...” ending. So here we are, 16 months later, I've come across the event in my photo archives.The event for recently-come-of-age adults is introduced and descried on the earlier post, so I'll just get into the photos.

As I've mentioned in other posts about this annual event, the crowds are utterly ridiculous. Having made the effort to get close in previous years, the above photo shows the closest I bothered with this time.

At one point I did have a view of the board used to indicate to the archers whether they connected on either of the two arrows they were allowed to shoot. Six archers shoot at once, so the board shows the results for twelve arrows:

Rather than try to muscle my way through the crowds to see the actual event, I spent more time in the less-crowded areas, using my big lens to reach across the crowds to zoom in on scenes of interest...

With crowds like we had, and my not being 10 feet tall, I often got unlucky with people caught out of focus in the frame, such as the big orb at the bottom of the shot above, which I assume is some person's head.

I also had my 70-200 zoom for more-traditional shots.

When the kids posed, they usually did so without the heavy leather glove worn on the pulling hand while shooting, and never posed with an actual arrow...

With all this color and posing and youthful spirit, there also congregated a lot of cameras...

Damien Douxchamps stopped by as well, and uncharacteristically smiled (sort of) for my camera.

I tried not to contribute to too much “mob scene” feeling, so would retreat to a quiet distance with my long lens. So while the crowd above continued, I opted for a different approach to the same subjects...

Another thing I could do was just wander and focus on patterns or small details...

In looking at that last photo I realized how much work many of the ladies put into their hair.