Camp Japanorama!

Some new layouts from our first weekend photography field-trip

Last weekend brought the first Japanorama overnight field-trip out of  Tokyo. We plan to do one of these every season and already planning the autumn adventure, so we’re really pleased how the first one came off.

We all met up in Omori early on the Saturday morning, picked up the bus and loaded it with what amounted to no small amount of gear. The drive down was pretty quick and easy, with hardly any traffic at all encountered on the way. I got the hang pretty quickly of the 7metre bus we’d hired and we arrived safely in Onjuku just after 11am.

Over the course of the two days we split the group in half, with Irwin and myself working on a separate project with each small group of people. Irwin’s project was to produce a bunch of fashion shots with our two models, Dean and Julia, to make up a pretend magazine spread. One lucky student will soon, in fact, get the chance to see their spread of shots in the first issue of our new Japanorama webzine.

You can see a video of the weekend here, shot by Yuto Watanabe.

My project was tasked around producing a series of shots for a fictional CD compilation of classical music, but I took Dean with my group on the Sunday too and we also got some great shots of him.

The weather was superb, very hot in fact – which always makes shooting hard but people faired well and we didn’t go crazy about shooting non-stop all day.

Some great sights, nice company, good food, a nice ryokan to stay in all made for a lovely working weekend away. From what we’ve seen so far, people got some great shots and I think everybody picked up some good tips and learned some things.

We’ll be putting shots up here on a rolling basis. A couple of people have finished their spreads already and they are below. You’ll already find a good selection of shots in our Flickr group too. Be sure to take a browse through there.

Update: Fernando’s CD and magazine layouts have come in. Great work Fernando!

Find more work by Fernando here.

The magazine spread from Justin Choulochas:

Simon Hunter‘s CD and magazine spreads:

There is a slideshow of some of my shots below. I tend not to shoot a huge amount when I’m out teaching as it’s more about getting the other people excited and enthused and helping out. But, I got some nice shots too. All the ones below are straight from the camera. I’ll be editing some of the best up and making a spread of shots for each project myself.

Onjuku and environs by Alfie: all straight out of the camera.

[Show as slideshow]

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