Less Is More: A Night Street Photography Critique with Lukasz Palka
In this episode, Tokyo-based street photographer Lukasz Palka, of the YouTube channel EyExplore, joins me to critique a set of reader-submitted night photos. We talk about colour, motion blur, and the disciplined art of leaving things out of the frame, and Lukasz closes by picking apart one of his own favourite shots.
Check out Lukasz. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/EYExplore
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eyexplor/
Website: https://www.eyexplore.com
Less Is More: A Night Street Photography Critique with Lukasz Palka
In this episode, Tokyo-based street photographer Lukasz Palka, of the YouTube channel EyExplore, joins me to critique a set of reader-submitted night photos. We talk about colour, motion blur, and the disciplined art of leaving things out of the frame, and Lukasz closes by picking apart one of his own favourite shots.
Introduction
"Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. I am here with Lukasz Palka, who is a photographer based in Tokyo. Hello Lukasz, how are you doing today? Thank you for joining me."
Hello everyone, yeah, thank you as well, I'm doing good and excited to do this, let's talk about some photos, it's always fun to look at other people's work.
"Yeah, the idea behind this is that I'm going to show you photos from our community, and I would like to ask you to tell us your opinion, what you think about those, and to maybe critique them as if you had taken them, or as if some of your clients had. Because I know you do workshops and you also have a YouTube channel, EyExplore, so maybe you want to tell us a little more about your photography, your project."
Yeah, so basically these days I'm focusing on the YouTube channel. Currently you can't really travel to Japan, so the workshops are sort of on hold right now, so we made it virtual, the YouTube channel is meant to be sort of like a virtual workshop. Of course it's not as personal as our real workshops, which we do one-on-one or in very small groups usually, which I enjoy quite a lot, but it's the second best thing, and I'm having a lot of fun with YouTube these days with my partner at EyExplore, named Axel. The channel is all about shooting in Tokyo, street photography and other kinds of urban photography, and a little bit of philosophy pinched in the mix as well.
"Okay, all right, so today's round is actually night photography, so let's get started. What do you think about the first photo?"
@gettons
Right, so, right away, and this is, I've had it on the screen the whole time as we were just doing the intro, it's very pleasant to look at, it's a very mesmerizing photo, and it is the kind of thing I would love to shoot, especially in terms of the colour and the light. So what attracts me especially to shooting photos at night, in a city like Tokyo or in a space like this, is the colours in the light themselves, regardless of what the subject is, and sometimes I'll frame up something really mundane, like just a bicycle or something, just because the light is beautiful. This photo has this great quality of light, with the dusk, the blue tones of the dusk, with the nice contrast with the warm tones of the playground, the amusement park. So that's excellent, and I wouldn't do it any different in that case. In terms of composition though, I'm very picky when things are, how do I say, distracting, there can be subtle things, but things that take away from what I want the subject to look like. So at first I see, of course, the carousel and its beauty and all that, but then I'm a little bit drawn to the figures at the bottom, and they're a little bit, if it was me, I would have probably tried to either completely frame them out, at least all of them except for one, the one man that's sticking up on the left, he's sort of a silhouette against the sky, he's maybe the one that can stay, but the other ones, there's like another silhouette at the bottom, there's the little guy in the background in the sneakers and shorts, there's another guy in a cap, I would have waited for them to move away or hid them somehow. And then even the guy who I said I like, he's looking the wrong way, because he's looking away from the carousel, and it makes me wonder what he's looking at, and I'm not looking at the carousel any more. So little things like that are secondary, and they would bother me, so I would either wait for a better moment, maybe when the main guy is looking at the carousel, or I would maybe frame them out entirely, so it's just the carousel in the sky, from a lower position, so I don't even see the fence, the barrier, something like that. But it's still a very strong photo, I don't think it's a bad photo at all. One last little thing I would love to see, I wonder what it would look like if the shutter speed was, say, a twentieth or a tenth of a second, instead of what it is here, which is pretty fast. Just out of curiosity, I would have tried it for sure, myself, I would have done a fast one like this, and I would have done another one with a very slow shutter, just to see how the motion blur looks, because it might look really cool, but yeah, that's a different photo.
"And is that something you like to try mostly for night photography, or do you like slow shutter speed for street photography overall?"
Yeah, I play around with it, so it just depends what's moving. Just people on the street, that kind of thing, usually I don't have an idea to use a slow shutter, I mean I'm not saying it can't work, but one thing I like to shoot typically is things like cars, it's kind of cliché, but cars or bicycles driving by, and then you do a panning shot, that's an example of when I would drag the shutter, get it pretty slow, to like a thirtieth or something, which would create a nice motion blur. So when I'm presented with movement, some sort of motion around me, then I'm curious to see what it looks like with a slow shutter, and this carousel, which I've never photographed something like this, by the way, I've never encountered something like this, if I had, I'd be curious to see what this would look like with a slow shutter.
"Yeah, now I'm also wondering the same thing. Moving on."
@JeffersonAphoto
Okay, so I like this one too, again, kind of dramatic right away, it immediately catches your attention. The thing that I like, that I also would look for in my own work, is that his position in the frame is such that he's just next to those white lights, so the lights frame him really well, he's very much a silhouette, and I like that. The scene overall, though, I mean, it's not the best scene, it has the thing that a lot of city scenes have, and I struggle with this myself all the time, and that's parked cars. I really, really hate parked cars, they just bother me, I look at the man first, because that's clearly the main thing, but then I also look at that silver-coloured part in the background. Now, again, I know the photographer couldn't do anything about this, and this doesn't mean it's automatically a bad photo, but it's just something that distracts me right away, but it's like, well, you can't do anything about it, perhaps it could have been mitigated by framing slightly differently, or standing back, using a longer focal length, but of course that's not always possible. The last thing that jumps out at me is that it does feel like there's some little subtle bits of motion blur here, maybe the shutter speed was a little too slow, again, not a big deal, because you could have a blurry photo that has so much emotion and impact that you don't care that it's blurry, but when it's a photo like this, where there isn't really any emotion from the subject himself, it's just a man walking, then I'm looking more at the overall rendering, the impact of the image as a whole, and that's when things like blurriness jump out at me, I'm like, well, why isn't it sharp, it could have been perfectly still, that would make those reflections and all that stuff on the road look a lot more crisp and pop out more, more satisfying to look at in terms of texture and contrast. But anyway, it's a good image, one last little thing, it doesn't look like a busy street, I also don't like the shoulder bag, it kind of breaks the shape of the silhouette, I would have probably waited around for a different person with a better shape, but maybe that was just not possible, I've also had shots where I waited ten minutes and eventually just gave up, so totally understandable. So that's all the stuff that comes through my mind for a shot like this.
"Perfect, yeah, let's take a look at this one."
@shorty.shots
This one I like right away, this is awesome, I like it because, of course, it's a simple photo, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I just mean it's clear what this photo is about and what I'm supposed to look at, at first, we could go deeper, but at first it's a simple photo. I like to tell people on my workshops, I use this phrase all the time, I say less is more, which means, obviously, the fewer things there are in your frame, the less stuff going on, the better. And just contrasting with the previous two photos, I was pointing out some distractions in those, this is distracting, that's distracting, well, in this one there's nothing really distracting me, because there's not much in the photo, the things that are there are all relevant to what the photographer was trying to show me, at least visually, the actual content of the photo. I'm not sure what they were trying to show me emotionally, but that's okay, because that's always up for my interpretation, and my interpretation emotionally of this photo is that it's kind of spooky, that silhouette looks sort of inhuman, looks like an alien or something, and so it's kind of a creepy vibe, and I think that's a good thing, because having some kind of emotional response from an image shows that it has some strength, it's a strong image in that sense. I also think I get why the photo's framed this way, I think the photographer wanted the subject dead in the centre, which is what it is, but that also creates a kind of slight imbalance, from a compositional perspective, because there's this black bar on the right, which is like the frame of the window or something, and then the left side has this black space, but the right side has a little bit of the glow. So I wonder if this would look better either cropped a bit to remove some of the left side, or framed more to the right, or perhaps this would have looked really good framed as a landscape shot. But anyway, those are just speculations on my part, because I wasn't there, I don't know, maybe this is the perfect framing of the scene as it is, if I was standing there I would have maybe framed it the same way, because I don't know what's around the frame. But anyway, I like this one, this is a nice impact, I also love the colour, it's really nice, very satisfying.
"And if you personally saw something like that later, would you edit that, make it darker, or is that a no-no for you, like, not three movies, but just a dodge or burn, you know, if this is the light, and you do a gradient filter from the right, you can make it completely black."
Sure, I agree, and I know, I understand what you mean, the thought, as I was just talking about it, of course did cross my mind. I am very handy with Photoshop and I can do all kinds of cool stuff, but for me, for a street photo like this, I wouldn't do such a thing, and this isn't, you know, I'm sure many street photographers, especially old-school ones, will tell you that's a no-no, this is a crime against humanity, you cannot do this kind of thing. I don't really care, I don't have some sort of moral or ethical dilemma about it, I just have rules for myself, creative constraints, and one of those creative constraints is I don't add or remove things in my street photography, what's there is there, if there's something that doesn't look good, like that car in the last photo, then I have to just go back and reshoot it some other way. That's the rule, and that's because it's a slippery slope, once you start removing stuff, it can get really out of hand, it can just go crazy. So for me, the answer is no, I would not modify the photo that way.
"Okay, all right, thank you, all right, let's take a look at this one."
@sacks
Okay, I like this one in many ways, I'll start with the positives. Something about this one, this is the first one that has this quality to it, the other photos, the people were kind of abstract, but this one we're getting a little bit closer to the subject, and I can feel more of some emotion, there's like a story I can imagine about her, it may not be the truth, it may not be what was actually happening in that moment, but it's like a still from a movie scene, I could start putting my own subjective perceptions into this scene. And so I get a lot from that, the way she's posed, she's got like one shoulder up, she's looking that way, she's got what looks like an earbud in her ear, listening to some music, lost in thought, it's night time, I believe, it's kind of hard to tell, but it feels like it's dark because there are street lights outside, so it's maybe evening, but then again it's kind of bright in the bus. In any case, to me it feels like it's late in the day, maybe she's coming home from work, so I like all that, it's very subtle, and you can pick up all that just from this simple scene, and like I said before, less is more, this is a pretty minimal scene, there's not too much going on. The text is cut off, which is like, maybe the camera could have been moved slightly more to the left and aimed slightly more to the right, so I don't see part of the text, there's a term, I believe it comes from psychology, it's called edge flicker, I think, you could google it, it's just like when an object is cut off by the edge of the frame, we tend to focus on it, so that's a slight distraction, this text being half in half out, but it's a small thing. The main thing that I think is kind of a bad point is the way that light touches her forehead, so I would have moved around a little to move that away from her, so that the silhouette of her face is a little more distinct. Other than that, that's it, I mean it looks cool, I like the faded colours, so yeah, I like the scene, but little things to make it really, really perfect, those are really nitpicky, I admit.
"All right, thank you."
Yeah, this one I like a lot as well, I'm a pretty positive guy, so I generally do like the photo, and at first glance it's good. Again, in this case, it's the colour and that night vibe, kind of the similar thing I said about the initial photo, that red is very mysterious, where's this red coming from? If I'm logical about it, it's probably just a car out of frame, with the brake lights on, putting the red light down, but that's just me speculating about what's out of frame, just looking at the frame itself, I can imagine a lot of different things, it could be like a UFO coming down, alien abduction, and I like that there's a mystery to it, because you don't know where this insane, intense light is coming from, and then it's contrasted beautifully with the dark mountains, the night, and the clouds back there. It's clearly a pretty long exposure, because the clouds are very blurry-looking, they've been moving for a while, but not that long, because the stars are not moving. So there's this sense of mystery, why is the car there, there's nobody in it, it's probably just the photographer's car, but you don't know that. Overall I like it, I wouldn't honestly change much in this scene, all that stuff I said about the other photos, composition things being distracting, there really aren't such things in this photo, maybe this construction barrier thing, but it's not a big deal. So I don't have anything constructive to improve this photo, I think it just works for what it is, the story it's telling, I think it's telling pretty well.
My photo
Okay, so this one, again, I feel some emotion from it, just like the one with the lady on the bus, because we can sort of make some assumptions about this kid, and what's going on, I guess they're playing some sort of ball game, maybe soccer or futsal, in the street, and this one kid is farther back and he's sort of observing. I think the positioning of the elements in the frame is really good, I like that the kid is on the left, and he's looking at the group that's more on the right, so there's a leading line, a lot of people talk about leading lines as actual lines, like the cliché examples, the train tracks or something, but I think those leading lines can also be virtual, or invisible, and there's clearly a leading line from him to where we assume he's looking, because he's looking at those kids, plus the line on the ground he's standing on, the dashed road line, they're kind of pulling us into that distant part of the frame. So the main subject, this kid, is very strong, there's some issues with the framing, like his head is overlapping the background, but again, these are nitpicky things, I mentioned them in the other photos, they're not a big deal. Ultimately, overall, he's very well framed, the only thing I feel is a little bit missing is, okay, he's looking over there at that group, but what's really happening over there, it would be cool if there was maybe less bokeh, so we could see them a little more clearly, meaning a smaller aperture, but of course I understand it's night time, it's dark, you can't use f/11 in the middle of the night, you're going to use a big aperture like f/2 or something. So I don't know what the solution would have been, maybe there was no solution, maybe this is as good as this photo could have been in this moment, and I think it works pretty strongly, it's just I wish I could see a little more in that group, what they're doing, maybe a better moment, better timing, if there's some better action back there.
"Thank you."
@clairelions
Okay, so these kind of photos I do take sometimes, we talked a little bit about motion, and sometimes I'll put a slow shutter and create this big, blurry, messy, abstract thing, and sometimes it turns out pretty cool, but sometimes it turns out a little more like this. So then I have to say a little negatively, but I'll say some nice things first, I do like the colours, they're really beautiful, I love how the pink and the blue contrast, I like the red umbrella, which took me a little while to realize is an umbrella, but overall, I don't know if the blur effect, clearly the photographer was turning or spinning the camera to achieve this, I don't know what it really adds here, other than it just makes it look abstract. This is one of those things where it's like the shotgun technique, you just shoot and it goes everywhere, you take a bunch of photos and maybe one of them turns out okay, but it's good for trying, I appreciate it, because I experiment with these kinds of things too, but ultimately I usually realize these kinds of things go nowhere, there needs to be some control, because this was clearly done completely by hand, and the camera was moving in every direction, and when I do these, I used to do them this way, and I learned that I could move the camera on one or two axes, but not all three, because if it's all three, it turns into a mess like this, whereas if you only move it on one axis, you'll get vertical lines or horizontal lines, or if you rotate the camera you get radial motion, or you can zoom, there's the zoom blur effect, if you do everything at the same time, it's kind of a mess like this. I also like just the top of the frame, concretely, the top of the frame doesn't have so much motion, although of course it does, but you don't see it because there's no lights up there. So I think I've clarified that. One last little tiny thing that jumps out at me, and a lot of people make this mistake, notice at the front, this is from the editor, the pink colour and the blue colour, there's like a very strong barrier, and that's because whoever was editing this pushed the colours too much, and the colours kind of broke, too much Photoshop, and most people probably don't notice that, but I notice these things, and they're very distracting to me when I see issues like that. But that's not the main problem with this photo, it's just too much motion, not enough substance.
"All right, thank you, moving on."
@lacuna_josh_bw
And, oh, okay, so this is cool, I love taxis, that's why I said, oh okay, you're scrolling down and the taxi came into view, I realized, okay, this is the kind of thing I would shoot, because I always am hunting for taxi drivers, there's something about taxis in general, they're interesting and colourful, and they usually exude some character of whatever city they're in. In this case I see some Asian characters, but I live in Japan, so it doesn't look Japanese to me, this is China or Taiwan or something, in fact it says TP-129 on the taxi, I'm assuming that's Taipei, this is probably Taipei, just a hunch. Anyway, you can get a lot of information from the taxi, it's such a representative thing of the city, and I also love that it's the moment when people are getting out, because the taxi driver's little light is on, and you can see in the photo that he's lit up in there, and I like that. And then the scene overall is cool, this background is cool, it's interesting. What I would probably want, if I was going to change something and make this photo more impactful, is get closer, because the building is cool, but what I really want to see is that taxi driver in there, I want to see a bit more of these people getting out, and I feel like we're a little too far away, but that's a different photo, maybe I'm forcing the photographer to do something they weren't wanting to do, they wanted to show this building in contrast with the taxi, which does work, it's a cool scene. But yeah, that would just be my thing, and just lastly, about the colours and the mood, I have a feeling it's shot on film, and that means the colours are just what they are, I think they work here, I would love to see a bit of a cooler tone, out of curiosity, to let those reds pop, but it is what it is, and the colours do work, I think it looks nice, it's attractive, it's a satisfying photo to look at.
"For me, I kind of feel like the building has the brightest part of the picture, I'm not quite sure what was the main subject of the photo, as my eyes keep going back there. And as you said, if that was a taxi, I would probably go a little closer, and also try to get some kind of different gesture, or some better separation of the subject exiting the car, because it feels like those are maybe two people, but they kind of blend together."
I guess that's right. I think closer, maybe a horizontal frame instead of a vertical frame, to better have the driver on the left, the people on the right, and then also, even though it's hard to tell because it's so small here, the mirror is kind of in front of his face actually, so if the camera was a little lower, he would be more visible. But to me it seems like the intention of the photographer was to show us this driver, the taxi, the whole thing there.
"But you're right, the building is the brightest part, we're more kind of looking at the background as well."
Yeah, so I think that's just, getting closer overall, which is a very common piece of feedback for street photography, just get closer, I struggle with that myself to this day sometimes, I know I'm not close enough.
"All right, moving on."
@inframeswetrust
Oh yeah, this is really cool right away, I like this, this is a great shot, because it's dangerous, and I don't mean this in a physical danger sense, but in terms of creative danger, it's dangerous to try to get three people in silhouette like this, because inevitably what happens most of the time is they overlap in a really awkward way, and then you can't tell if it's one person or three people. In this case they overlap beautifully, and this is so cool, the way the two guys in the back have their legs cross and create an X, and they're all evenly spaced, and then on the ground there are three stripes that lead straight to the guys, and I think that's so cool, and it comes from the corner, I love when diagonal lines go from the corner, because then I feel like the image is really fixed into the frame, like if you have a corner and you put a line in it, it feels wedged in there, that's sort of how I think about diagonal lines in the corners of photo frames, they kind of wedge the whole scene in there. So these guys, this whole thing, is kind of wedged into that one corner, which I like. We talked a lot about distractions, which is something I'm always watching out for, what can I remove from the frame, I wouldn't really remove anything from this frame, there's nothing in here that's pulling my eye away, there's a nice hierarchy, it's very obvious that I look at the guys first, I look at the lines on the ground, of course the two big blue lights, and then I start to look around and find other things, like the cables, the little arrow on the right side, the blue sign with the white arrow, the bus stop structure or whatever that is on the left, there's all these other little elements that I see, but I don't see them before the subject, and that's what makes it a strong photo for me, when there's a clear hierarchy, look here, here, here, it could be anywhere in the frame, but I know where I'm supposed to look, it's easy to parse visually. And besides that, I love these colours, this blue and red aura mixing together in this kind of rainy, foggy haze, is awesome, so yeah, this is a great photo, I really like this one, I would be happy to have taken such a photo myself, put it that way.
"All right, moving on."
https://www.chrismazmanian.com
Ah, this one is also really good, I like this too, I love the colours in this one. Now, the overarching theme, I've said it at the beginning, with my night photography I love looking for great colours and interesting light, and this photo has that, that's why I'm happy with it, please, just like the previous one as well, it's pleasing right away. Overall I love that purple aura in the sky, and then that subtle green in the grass, green and violet are kind of complementary colours, but then we have these punctuations of orange from those lights, and again I'm going to guess this was probably shot on some kind of film, because I feel like film usually has this beautiful colour contrast at night, and the glow as well from those lights, but who knows, maybe it's digital, I don't know, doesn't matter, it's just my observation. And then, of course, the white house, which that white colour has some colour in it, kind of greenish, bluish, whatever, but basically it's black and white, the house stands out beautifully from this otherwise colourful scene. Again, I love it, none of those distractions or anything, it's a very clean scene, very easy to look at, and it has a lot of mood. In the previous one, I said so many glowing things about it, I didn't talk about mood, so let's talk about mood in this one, there's so many emotions you can pull from it, and again, as the viewer, I have sort of free reign on how I can interpret it, so it leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but it gives me a lot to work with. So I can feel a sense of loneliness, a sense of nostalgia, it feels kind of like summer, who knows, maybe it's really cold, but I feel warm looking at this photo, like a hot summer evening in July, and I can hear crickets and stuff, it's kind of a humid evening, it reminds me of when I was a kid, because that's kind of what it was like when I was a kid growing up in Chicago. So I like a photo that I can sort of place myself in, and feel what it feels like to be in this place, even if I'm wrong, like I said, it doesn't matter, because it's just my interpretation, but there are photos that won't give you much to work with, where you can't really feel much, or it's just, okay, it's a thing. Well, this one has a lot of that emotional content, which I like, even though it's just a photo of houses.
"All right, moving on."
@zoximage
Okay, so we have another blurry, abstract one, and I will say, you see this one, although it does have a lot of motion, kind of like that other one, there's a little bit more structure to it, and the reason, I feel, is because it's just simpler, there's less stuff in the frame, so, again, I kind of know what I'm supposed to look at. I'm looking at the subject, which is this silhouette of a band that's kind of distorted within this arched passageway, in some kind of, I don't know, European-looking city, I'm going to guess some kind of castle-like passage, that's my imagination, I don't know. I like the colours as well, the kind of greenish tones with the violet tones and the orange tones, but I will say, in this case, the blurry thing, again, it's very dangerous to use blur at night, because it makes me wonder, well, why is this part of the photo, what does it add to the scene, how is the blur being used to say something about the scene, or is it just a visual effect, which is not wrong, by the way, I think, there's nothing wrong with something that's aesthetically pleasing just for the sake of being aesthetically pleasing. If that's the case, if this is just purely for aesthetics, then I think it's overall succeeding, this kind of abstract aesthetic is cool, but I don't feel like it adds to any story that might have been here, and so, unlike the previous photo, I don't feel much story from this photo, because it's just abstract, so there's not much to take from it. I'll say one more thing, in terms of composition, framing, I think this would look really good if it was cropped to like a 16:9 or something, I feel like there's too much space along the bottom, and the subject is kind of floating far from the bottom of the frame, if it was more like a widescreen, cinematic sort of thing, I think it would help this image, make it easier to look at, from left to right, and sort of ignore this mostly empty bottom area. That's just a compositional thing.
"All right, thank you."
@ma.druga
Okay, so yeah, I like this one too, a very different tone from everything we've covered so far, this is obviously more of a gritty street photo, right, as some classic street photographers say, you can smell the street in this one, it's a bit grittier. This weird kind of guy, he's dressed like a dog, I don't even know what's going on, is he wearing a dog helmet, like a mask, a flop, I don't know, I've never seen such a thing, he's got glasses on, it's all really cool. And this is a good example, on an earlier photo I said it's a little blurry, a little out of focus, unsharp, and it was a distraction for me, because that photo was very much about the graphical quality of it, the silhouette, the contrast. This photo is also a little out of focus, and whatnot, and I don't really care, it doesn't bother me at all, because I know I'm looking at a clear, interesting, impactful subject, like this, those technical things take a very secondary back seat. I mean, it would have been cool if his hand was more in focus, whatever, or less motion blurred, but honestly, it doesn't matter, what matters is this cool moment being captured. And the timing is nice, I like that he's framed evenly between those people, I actually like that you can see those people's faces, because again, whatever's out of the frame, for the viewer, in my opinion, it's free reign, I can decide with my imagination anything I want about the immediate external part of the frame. So to me all the people in the background are looking at this dude, going, what is going on, and that helps me create this narrative that this guy is just messing around, he's the star of the show. So I like that there's context, that if the people weren't there it would be a little less interesting to me, so I kind of like that that's there.
"Yeah, I like it, that's it, I just like it, it's so cool, kind of a weird crazy night scene, very good."
So, again, I'll start with the colours, because I think a lot of what I've seen tonight, the colours are really cool, and this one is no exception, I love this pink, green, orange, a little bit of subtle blues in there, it's a very nice palette, very cool palette, also the textures, the blurry wall, a lot of the background is in focus, that's all really cool. But the main guy there himself, again, it's the curse of the backpack, that backpack looks almost like a second person, and again it just makes me wonder, okay, this photo's all right, it looks pretty cool, like I said, has nice colours, nice mood, atmosphere, but it feels like the photographer should definitely come back here and shoot this again, with potentially a better subject, on a different evening, or whatever, if possible, maybe it's not possible. But this guy, unlike, for example, I don't know if you want me to reference too much of the previous photos, because you might cut them out, but we talked about the photo of the lady on the bus, and I said I could kind of imagine a lot of her emotions and whatnot, I struggle to get much out of this guy, he's just a guy, right, he's just staring at washing machines. So that's the missing part, I think it needs a better subject, but it's a good idea.
"Yeah, that's what I was thinking when I first saw this picture, I was kind of like, if this was like a second person leaning on that guy, maybe with her hand on his shoulder, that would be a super cool picture."
Right, and you can imagine all kinds of stories with what's going on, the backpack spoils that, and actually, at first glance, that's what I thought it was, right away I was like, oh, okay, is that a person?
"All right, last photo, so this is my photo."
@lkazphoto
And what did I say about motion blur? Yeah, I'm glad I pointed that out, so I don't sound like a hypocrite, because if you look, for example, at the gallery on my homepage, that this photo is from, all the other photos are tack sharp, because I like them to be tack sharp, I try to, but I'm happy to ignore that rule if the content of the photo itself has some impact, and if the motion blur adds to something, and to me it did, when I shot this. By the way, when I shot it, I was quite disappointed by the fact that it was a little out of focus, motion-wise, because what was happening is this geisha got into the car, okay, and it was very dark, I mean, you can tell it was very dark, and I had a pretty slow shutter, because I wasn't really shooting things that were in motion, and then at that moment the car started to drive away, it just happened all very quickly, and honestly, this is years ago, so I don't remember the exact details of how it happened, but it happened quickly, and it came out kind of blurry like this, and I was like, oh man, I messed this up. But then, when I looked at it more closely, I realized that, at least in this case, I was happy with the blur, because it adds this feeling of a little bit of chaos in the geisha's life, if you know much about them, and you've actually spent time with them, and you've visited Kyoto, and you understand how these girls live their lives, it is kind of like this, it's a little bit chaotic. You'd think geishas have this very serene, they're these beautiful performers, they play shamisen, which is like a guitar, and they do these dances, and whatever, but actually their main job is to entertain their customers, people who hire them, they get hired to go to a restaurant and hang out with a group of people who want to party and have a good time, and they entertain them, they do music, they drink with them, they play drinking games, they actually have this very fun and very difficult drinking game, where they will beat you, and you will be the one drinking, not them. And then, when that appointment is finished, they go to the next appointment, the same night, so it's this kind of chaotic thing. And then on the street, there are no tourists now, but in those days there were tons of tourists, myself included, who are seeing them, and they're like, wow, they're sort of like celebrities, and the people, they're kind of surrounded by paparazzi, and by the way, in Kyoto they are kind of celebrities, people know them, they have names, stage names. So anyway, I'm getting really into the weeds about geishas, the point is, I realized that in this case this motion blur, for me, some viewers might disagree, might think this is actually a bad photo because of the blur, but for me the blur, I realized, adds to this life of the geisha, and despite being blurry and out of focus, I can still see her expression, I can still see that, amidst all this blur, she is so calm and composed, because that's another thing about geishas, they have to really control themselves, and control their movements, they train on how to move, hand gestures, everything is very trained. The only thing I hate about my own photo here, the one thing, is that stupid little light on her eye, I hate that thing, and it goes back to everything I said about distractions, I hate little distracting elements like that, and if I could go back in time and fix that somehow, I would, I could totally Photoshop it out, which you asked me about earlier, and I refuse to, because it's just my own personal belief, I don't want to remove something from a photo if it's already there. I kind of don't really mind that light, it gives this like a sci-fi vibe, if you imagine geishas, how they move really slow, it kind of reminds me of a show I saw in Tokyo, the robot show, I don't know if you know it, I wouldn't say it's worth it for the sixty bucks or however much it was, but it reminds me of that.
"And also, this is not how geishas are usually portrayed, right, they're usually everything is usually very curated."
I would say to a picture geisha, because that's how they want us to see them, I guess, and I've personally photographed many photos like that, when I had chances to photograph them, I've also photographed them very perfectly, very beautifully, everything sharp, and it's fine, I'm happy with those photos, but this one came out just right to be messy. But I'll admit there was a lot of happy accident here, it's not like I planned this, like I said, I was trying to get a clearer photo, and in this moment I did take some other shots of this whole scene, totally different angles and everything, she was also outside of the taxi, and in the end I realized those photos are really boring, they were actually quite dark. And this photo, with, and also the yellow light on the left is a reflection of the store or the restaurant behind me, so it's very lucky, it turned out very lucky, how quickly I shot this, just click, click, click, as she drove away, that the reflections didn't cover up her face even more than that little laser beam. So I'll fully admit there was a lot of luck here, I think the only thing I can take credit for is that I didn't discard this photo, because like I said, at first I thought this was a failure, and only later, after a little while, I realized actually this is pretty good, and now I keep it on my website as one of my favourite photos I've ever taken, especially of a geisha. So I think that maybe is the lesson here, that despite everything I said about blurry photos and all that, I think it's important to have an open mind, and to be accepting of flaws in images, if there is an underlying substance to the image, despite the technical flaws.
"Can I say one more little thing about this photo, you could get this maybe later, no problem."
If I turn off, if I turn off, how do I say, change background, okay, no blur, there we go, actually it's very hard to see, but that, back there, see it, this photo, very large, printed... but it's not a print, it's actually an illustration that an artist friend of mine did of this photo. She asked me if she could use it, she drew it, so that's an illustration, that big, she gave me as a gift, she illustrated a number of my photos, and the reason I'm bringing this up, not to show off or whatever, we could maybe, if you wanted, I could send you a link to her later. But the funny thing is, she moved the light on the eye, she repainted it almost exactly, it's very accurate, she was very careful, but this one detail, she kept it, but she moved it away from her eye, so it's not overlapping, and I was like, I'm so envious of this power that illustrators have, that they can just choose to move something, whereas we photographers are stuck with reality, we have to use what we're given by the universe, and it is what it is. Anyway, side story, I don't know if that's interesting, feel free to cut it out, but I just thought it was funny that she moved it.
Closing
"No, it was, so thank you, thank you very much for joining me, and I'm looking forward maybe to talk with you again, or maybe to meet you in Japan someday."
Please come, I'm looking forward to it, especially once people can start traveling to Japan again, soon.
"All right, so thank you, have a nice day."
Thank you so much, YouTube, bye-bye.
