Four years ago I visited Yokohama with a friend of mine, Mike, and some other random people. At that time I didn't have a proper camera and so the only photo I could take was one using my keitai (cell phone). Naturally the quality was not very good but I absolutely loved the photo because the composition was great!
Ever since then I always told myself if I ever went back to Yokohama I would take a proper camera and get this exact same shot but with 10x the megapixels and an infinitely better lens then the piece of shit that is contained within a keitai-camera. In spring of 09 my wife and I went to Tokyo to get her visa and her friends don't live all that to far from Yokohama and now I had my new Canon Kiss X2, what a great chance! So on Sunday April 5th, 2009 we decided we would go to Yokohama and I just knew I had to get this shot again with my new camera.
So we went to Yokohama and we enjoyed the miscellaneous things there are to do there. We went to Aka-Renga, the old port in Yokohama.
We ate a hawaiian cheeseburger. Ironic of course because Yokohama is most famous for China Town and the chinese restaurants there, but we were hungry and didn't want to wait that long to eat. In the end we actually never made it to China Town but we had both been there before soo many times it wasn't really all that important to do, yet again, for the tenth time.
Then lastly of course we headed over to Landmark Tower to get my oh sooo favorite shot of the beautiful building. On the way we ran into the middle of a performance, so we pulled up two places to sit and watched a guy juggle fire outside one of the main stations.
Now on to the tower. Actually in the photo above those columns in the background are part of the Landmark Tower base. My perfect angle and shooting position is just meters away, I was so excited, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. After four years of waiting, I was finally back to Yokohama with a kick ass camera and gear, I was there, in the flesh. The weather was good, it was sakura season, we had a great day, everything was perfect! I compared the image on my cell phone to what I was looking at. I walked around and tried to see, where was that perfect angle on Yokohama Landmark Tower? A little to the left, a little to right? Then I found it, I'm sooo close..
But what's this? A giant fucking information BOX?!
A giant information box was installed on the EXACT same position of my perfect angle!!! My hopes and dreams were destroyed. I did my damndest to work around the monstrosity but it was impossible, it was just too big and too shitty to deal with. My perfect shot is now immortalized by this information box, for that angle will never be shot again, the best we will ever have is the keitai image above. Taken on a lens that probably isn't even worth half a yen.
I took the best image I could with what I had to work with and went home. Once we got back Matsunaga I emailed the keitai photo to my hotmail address and checked it out on a big monster screen, and it turns out that the keitai image also has the shitty information box.
In the very bottom left corner you can make out the blue roof piece of the box. Wait a second I thought! If that shitty box has always been there, then maybe just maybe my DK2 image isn't all that bad after all. I immediately plugged my camera in and downloaded all the photos. Dammit! 450 god damn pictures...alright find Landmark tower, is this it? No. <next>, Is this it? No. <next>. Don don don, I skipped through all the miscellaneous images. Ah Ha! Eureka! And without further adu I present to you, Yokohama Landmark Tower DK2 Image - April 5th, 2009.
Perhaps not completely identical, but pretty damn close. To be honest I like them both. I still feel the keitai version has the better composition as I think the DK2 image is heavy on the right side with the sculpture but the two cameras have significantly different aspect ratios and re-creating the exact image is likely impossible. Naturally I could crop the new image to better "fit" with the old one but I really do like both images and though the goal was to get the exact same shot, a part of me is pretty happy that I didn't, because now I like both images just that much more since they can't be reproduced. I feel like these two shots become more genuine now that I know I can't reproduce them completely.
Thanks for reading.
Ever since then I always told myself if I ever went back to Yokohama I would take a proper camera and get this exact same shot but with 10x the megapixels and an infinitely better lens then the piece of shit that is contained within a keitai-camera. In spring of 09 my wife and I went to Tokyo to get her visa and her friends don't live all that to far from Yokohama and now I had my new Canon Kiss X2, what a great chance! So on Sunday April 5th, 2009 we decided we would go to Yokohama and I just knew I had to get this shot again with my new camera.
So we went to Yokohama and we enjoyed the miscellaneous things there are to do there. We went to Aka-Renga, the old port in Yokohama.
We ate a hawaiian cheeseburger. Ironic of course because Yokohama is most famous for China Town and the chinese restaurants there, but we were hungry and didn't want to wait that long to eat. In the end we actually never made it to China Town but we had both been there before soo many times it wasn't really all that important to do, yet again, for the tenth time.
Then lastly of course we headed over to Landmark Tower to get my oh sooo favorite shot of the beautiful building. On the way we ran into the middle of a performance, so we pulled up two places to sit and watched a guy juggle fire outside one of the main stations.
Now on to the tower. Actually in the photo above those columns in the background are part of the Landmark Tower base. My perfect angle and shooting position is just meters away, I was so excited, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. After four years of waiting, I was finally back to Yokohama with a kick ass camera and gear, I was there, in the flesh. The weather was good, it was sakura season, we had a great day, everything was perfect! I compared the image on my cell phone to what I was looking at. I walked around and tried to see, where was that perfect angle on Yokohama Landmark Tower? A little to the left, a little to right? Then I found it, I'm sooo close..
But what's this? A giant fucking information BOX?!
A giant information box was installed on the EXACT same position of my perfect angle!!! My hopes and dreams were destroyed. I did my damndest to work around the monstrosity but it was impossible, it was just too big and too shitty to deal with. My perfect shot is now immortalized by this information box, for that angle will never be shot again, the best we will ever have is the keitai image above. Taken on a lens that probably isn't even worth half a yen.
I took the best image I could with what I had to work with and went home. Once we got back Matsunaga I emailed the keitai photo to my hotmail address and checked it out on a big monster screen, and it turns out that the keitai image also has the shitty information box.
In the very bottom left corner you can make out the blue roof piece of the box. Wait a second I thought! If that shitty box has always been there, then maybe just maybe my DK2 image isn't all that bad after all. I immediately plugged my camera in and downloaded all the photos. Dammit! 450 god damn pictures...alright find Landmark tower, is this it? No. <next>, Is this it? No. <next>. Don don don, I skipped through all the miscellaneous images. Ah Ha! Eureka! And without further adu I present to you, Yokohama Landmark Tower DK2 Image - April 5th, 2009.
Perhaps not completely identical, but pretty damn close. To be honest I like them both. I still feel the keitai version has the better composition as I think the DK2 image is heavy on the right side with the sculpture but the two cameras have significantly different aspect ratios and re-creating the exact image is likely impossible. Naturally I could crop the new image to better "fit" with the old one but I really do like both images and though the goal was to get the exact same shot, a part of me is pretty happy that I didn't, because now I like both images just that much more since they can't be reproduced. I feel like these two shots become more genuine now that I know I can't reproduce them completely.
Thanks for reading.
