On this trip I haven’t brought a computer to edit photos from my a6500 on (ok I’ve got my iPad but that’s a whole other thing) which has led me to spend a bunch more time editing my phone photos.
Through a combination of copy/pasting adjustments between similar photos, and saving some presets, I can quickly and consistently get pretty good results.
These ones aren’t actually too heavily reliant on presets, but are the starting point of the style I settled on. It’s basically just some exposure adjustments (raising the shadows), boosting the clarity and texture, accentuating the colour and brightness of the walls, and adding a mild vignette.
The overcast weather meant there wasn’t a lot of room for playing with the light, but I think this really helped the phone capture the scene better. Without a lot of dynamic range—everything is pretty washed out—you’re free to add contrast back in yourself later.
I think one of the things I struggle with in photography is how to deal with a beautiful blue sky. I just can’t stand to leave it there. Instead I’m compelled to desaturate it or obscure it somehow.
Here I opted to wash out the whole image and restrict it to black and white, so the saturated sky disappears. You still get the feeling of a sunny day, but it doesn’t look like a cartoon, which fits in more with the mood of the photo.
It’s really hard to take pictures of surfers because they don’t hold still.
The first photo is an ~11-shot panorama with every shot taken fully zoomed in. This makes it super high resolution and a bit sharper than the second photo which is just a single shot.
Some shots from a morning swim. Black and white to move away from the blue-and-orange that is typical of the Sydney coastline.
Arrived with about 2 minutes to get ready before the fireworks started. There was a huge crowd so nowhere to setup the tripod. I ended up perched on top of a wall with the tripod mostly collapsed and almost falling off the wall.
Walked up to the back of Mt Inari to avoid the crowds. Shot at f1.4 most of the time as it was late in the afternoon and overcast. I would have liked to have a bit more freedom in focal length.
Two shots from the end of the day in Nara. I liked the late afternoon sun on the water, it would be better either with a more pleasant background—I don’t particularly like the building behind—or with a longer lens looking across the water, to emphasise the reflection.
I could endlessly take pictures of the roofs of temples.
Views on a walk around the hills in Kyoto. A little cheeky with the colours here to make it seem like it’s autumn, when in actual fact everything was quite green—like the last photo.
Taken from a rooftop bar that smartly sells access to their top-notch view of Shibuya Crossing. Had to take photos through somewhat messy glass, but this shot turned out well. I like the vivid yellow and clear shadows.
The foliage was not this brown/red colour, I was cheeky and adjusted the mostly-green boring shot to look like it came straight from Hero.
