Slideshow: Japan Festival 2010 Portraits

For 17 years, the Japan-America Society has been hosting the Japan Festival in Houston’s Hermann Park. It’s a relatively small festival compared to others held in the city, but it is packed with the excitement of continuous live performances of Japanese music, drummers, and the martial arts. Of course there’s food, including sushi and other Japanese dishes prepared by master chefs, as well as many other local vendors at the festival. In The Japanese Garden at Hermann Park, visitors can rent traditional Japanese attire and stroll through the garden. Except for a few light showers early on Saturday (which made the azaleas and other flowers perk up later on) the weather was outstanding on both days of the festival. Each year over 20,000 visitors attend during the two days of the festival and it is consistently rated as one of the best festivals in the city.

I was invited by Kinjo Yonemoto to volunteer for a shift in the Japanese Garden taking portraits of folks who had rented costumes. I took my new Canon Speedlite 580EX II to use for outdoor fill flash. What I learned is that I need a lot more experience using this handy device outdoors. While I feel very comfortable using natural light for portraiture after taking a course at HCP a few weeks ago, I still have a lot to learn about controlling flash. I think I would have been much happier using some reflectors instead of the flash unit. My biggest problem was controlling color cast and reflected color from the brightly colored costumes and parasols.  Even using flash compensation of -2 still caused a lot of color to be bounced onto and reflected back off of the subject’s faces. All in all, I took 32 portraits (5-10 poses each) in 3 hours and gained a lot more experience. The other great but difficult exercise was sorting through and picking only one pose each to submit back to the festival’s website for the visitors to retrieve. My preference is to select images that display the subject as much if not more than the costume. Unless the visitor asked for a full body shot, I almost always selected the compromise of a bust shot.

The festival and the portraiture experience was a lot of fun. I wish I had planned better and made time to see and photograph more of the festival. I’ll definitely be back next year – hopefully as a volunteer photographer as well.