It’s something of a tradition for Alfie  to capture the first sunrise. And he hopes this year’s is less eventful than in 2009.

Last year myself and Justin – one of my friends & photography students -  met up at 5am in Shimbashi and headed down to the Takeshiba Pier to photograph the first sunrise of 2009. We plan on doing the same this year and I will be holding a workshop on how to get the best shots.

Not knowing exacctly where on the skyline the sun was going to appear, Justin and I may not have had – in hindsight – the best spot last year. But, we had a good spot nonetheless and an interesting background of some triangular shaped building and the Marine Survey vessels across the bay.

The only fly in the ointment was a drunk Japanese guy who turned up at exactly the moment the sun appeared, stripped to his underpants, jumped the railings to where I was set up, stood himself right in front of my camera and proceeded to shout about how stupid foreigners were in general and especially for sitting here with our cameras for hours to catch the sunrise. Right. I mean, I’ve never seen the Japanese queueing up for hours on end for seemingly pointless reasons, have you?

Justin managed to pacify the guy but it meant he lost a lot of shooting time, more than me. But I was thankful for his intervention, especially when the guy started touching my camera,as I threatened to push him into the bay and that could all have ended in tears. I was set up two feet from the edge of the pier and given his totally random behaviour I was worried he would pitch me and/or my equipment into the water.

Here are a couple of Justin’s shots from that morning.

This is the first of a number of shots I made that morning and one that made it as Japan Today’s ‘Picture of the Day’ for Jan. 1st and became ‘Pic of the Week’ for the first edition of Metropolis magazine in 2009.

Nikon D300
Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 ED IF @ f/8
Five-frame bracketed burst with HDR made in Photomatix 2.5.4

So, this year we have the same idea.. minus the drunk dude, I hope.

Drop me a line to alfie[atmark]alfiegoodrich.com if you are interested in tagging along. It’s a class, so there is a small charge but it’s the first class of the year so that fee is just 1000Yen. We’ll be dealing with how to shoot the sunrise to best effect and Justin will be doing a special workshop entitled ‘The Finer Points of Getting Rid of Drunken Japanese Idiots’.

We’ll be broadcasting the event live from my iPhone, using Ustream. It’s a bit of an experiment, but tune in to the link below as I will be trying my very best to make it all work.

Hope to see you there. Bring warm clothes and coffee, your camera, a wide-angle lens, something telephoto and a tripod.

Details of the meetup:

Meeting place will be Hamamatsucho JR Station, Central ticket gate, at 5.30am. We’ll walk from there over to Takeshiba Pier area.

Sunrise is at approx 6.51am, so we’ll have time to get ourselves a nice spot, setup and for me to give everyone pointers as to how to go about shooting the event. I’ll also be broadcasting the sunrise live from the iPhone over Ustream.

Map of the place we’ll be going is here.

Ustream link for those that can’t make it, is here.

This area is easy to get to using the trains and affords some nice views over the bay as well as of the Rainbow Bridge. Someone suggested shooting from the bridge itself, which is a nice idea but one that a horde of other people usually have – which means crowds. Also, the walk to a decent vantage point on the bridge means meeting up a lot earlier which becomes hard given the trains not running early enough.

My mobile is 090 9971 7805 and alfiejapanorama@gmail.com

I will probably send out one last mail tomorrow just in case of any changes to the plan. Thanks to those who have signed up already. Wear warm clothes and bring change for the vending machine coffee!