A not so family album

Tokyo subway, Nov 2022. S&S and the children.

Tokyo & Karuizawa

This is a collection of photographs I took visiting family in Japan in November last year.

Japan is one of my favourite places to photograph: I love the intensity of the big cities, but it’s also a chance to photograph the grandchildren. Covid made it very hard to photograph them from afar, so last year was a chance to catch up. I’m making up for just having a collection of images of the first 2.5 yrs of my grand-daughter’s life snapped while talking on FaceTime.

Big Camera, Little Camera?

The question of what equipment to take with me always ways heavy when I’m going somewhere. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no one camera that covers everything. I use Canon cameras for work: big, hefty things with rather large lenses.

On this trip, I didn’t want to cart lots of equipment with me as we planned to travel around. Besides, it’s harder to fade into the background with a large camera. So, I just took the Lumix GX9, which is a very small digital camera, along with the minuscule 12-32 mm lens. The whole setup was so small it could fit in my coat pocket at a push, but was perfect for hanging around my neck most of the time on the trip.

I didn’t want to take posed portraits of the family. Small children can’t sit still that long! Instead, I kept 99% of my photography to snapping away whenever I had a moment, snatching a second here or too, documenting the things that caught my eye. There is so much to see and do in Japan that it’s important to stay in the moment and not just focus (!) on what you can see through the lens.

Here are a few snapshots that captured some of the things I saw, felt, or noticed. Not too many family shots, but I’m sharing one or two.