I tried some long-exposure shots in the same quaint area of Kyoto — Gion — in which I got some night cherry-blossom shots last week. All the photos last week were hand-held, short-exposure shots, so today, I thought I'd try a followup to the nighttime long-exposure shots from my previous post.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 50mm — 42 sec, f/22, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cobblestone Street and Cherry Blossoms

It was much more crowded now that the blossoms are in full bloom. Pretty much everyone in Japan who owns a camera was there with their camera. But despite the crowd, it was really nice. The only people who didn't have a camera were the geisha and maiko who were walking or scurrying about.

In order to “see through” all the people, I used a tripod and relatively long exposures. The one above is 42 seconds, at f/22. The small aperture (large “f” number) means that something has to remain unmoving for a while (or be really bright) to actually make it into the image, and as such, people milling about would become translucent, or even remain invisible.

My biggest worry was that a car might come along and ruin the shot with its bright lights, but it all worked out well. (It seems that I caught some kind of repeating yellow light in lower-right corner of the shot above, but I have no idea what it was.)

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — 33 sec, f/18, ISO 100, P.P. boost: +1.00EV — map & image data — nearby photos
Reverse-Angle View

Anthony was with me, having returned from Malaysia with Fumie and Fumie's mom (in a repeat of last year's trip to Malaysia, this time sans me), and he helped me pick some locations.

Having picked them up at the airport early this morning, I'm beat, so just these two pictures for now...