From the Archive #6

I recently came across the work of Masashi Wakui, a Japanese photographer who produces some wonderful stylised street photography of scenes around Tokyo. In particular I really love his nighttime shots which I feel do a great job of capturing the essence of the city. It gave me the inspiration to go back through my archive to see if I had any decent nighttime street scenes from my various Japan trips I could treat in a similar way. Many of the night shots I have from Japan were shot on a Nikon D90 which at best had middling low light performance and fairly poor dynamic range compared to today’s standards. This makes doing much of anything with them a fairly frustrating experience; blown highlights stay forever blown, and the shadows do little but yield noise when pushed. But a few images from my last trip in 2011, where I took a D7000 with me, came out better. This one from Shinjuku, shot near the charmingly named, but actually really quaint and interesting “piss alley” turned out quite well.