Learning to Find Minimal Images in Hokkaido

so it's about -5° C half 7 in the morning and I'm in snowy Hokkaido in [Music] Japan so Hokkaido is the northern island in the Japanese Peninsula and we came here primarily to shoot the uh the incredible Landscapes of the Interior where you've got these Rolling Hills and really beautiful minimalist scenes but our first stop has been here at this incredible Tor gate in a place called shazan betsu so this is a shrine built on the edge of the ocean we came here last night to photograph it but we had really bright Skies a very very harsh scene there was no snow here and it really didn't work but it snowed overnight this morning we got this wonderful dusting of snow and these perfect heavy Skies now for these kind of snowy scenes I don't really want Golden Light and colorful sunsets I actually prefer these dark heavy brooding clouds that we've got now because they really help create this mood and they sort of adds to the snow they sort of Dark Skies white snow contrasts really really nice so this morning we came we've had about an hour we've just been moving around the the Tate finding different angles just shooting it from different different sides shooting it straight on symmetrically Works quite nice but shooting it from from the side you get a slightly different angle you get some of the snow that's piled on the side of the T gate and also just playing around with different exposures some really really long exposures to blur the water but now I think we're pretty much done it's been a really wonderful productive morning we're going to go back to the hotel have breakfast and then head to the to the next place [Music] [Music] so we came to Hokkaido cuz in the winter it's covered in a few meters of snow you can see here this landscape behind me it's just abs absolutely blanketed in powder which gives this incredible minimalist scenes and I've always been quite drawn to Simplicity and minimalism in a lot of my photography but it's often quite hard to do because Landscapes by their very nature are chaotic there's just so much going on in any given scene messy foregrounds just so much in any scene that you stand in front of there's so much snow here that the snow actually simplifies the landscape by covering everything in this blanket of white it makes it much simpler and cleaner to shoot you've got far fewer distractions far fewer things competing for your attention so what we've been doing is just driving around ba which is a part of AR kaido that we're in looking for simple elements single single trees on Hills things like that which really work in minimal Landscapes now I've talked before about whenever you're shooting Landscapes you're trying to find the essence of a scene you're trying to distill everything that you see in front of you down to one single frame and pretty much that's what Hokkaido is you've got these rolling Hills with these single trees or groups of trees Standing On Top of the hills and at this time of year with all this snow that just creates incredible CLE incredibly clean minimalist images [Music] and what we're also finding at this time of year is that the Cloudy Skies really add a lot of mood so we've been kind of hoping for overcast skies because that just gives you this very monochromatic palette to work with it's not really a landscape of golden light and sunrises and sunsets it doesn't really work like that it feels much better this is a kind of landscape that you feel should be monochromatic just very simple colors whites and Blues so heavy clouds cloudy weather works really well particularly when it's snowing so compositionally when you're in a place where you're working with just a single element what you're going to have is a lot of negative space the snow here the foreground is negative space the sky is also negative space that has a lot of compositional weight whenever I set my camera up to compose there's a temptation to put the uh to put the subject put it right in the middle and put the Horizon across the middle and have a very symmetrical scene but with such a limit with such a limited scene with such minimalism that's not necessarily the most interesting way of composing so what I've been doing is trying to move the subject around the frame putting in the bottom left corner put it in the bottom right corner have put it in the top and have lots of negative space below or put it right on the bottom of the frame and have lots of negative space in the sky above also just using different focal lengths getting a little bit wider to get a lot of the context or just zooming into crop tighter so that when I get home we're going to have a lot of competitions and I'll be able to decide which one that I like best so here are three slightly different images of the same tree the first one is centered but I also shot it off center I shot it vertically and I think this one is my favorite as a negative space to the right does work to balance the tree gives the image a little bit of Harmony sometimes though this Center composition did work I preferred it in these two images and it's hard to say why it's just something that I felt after living with a different compositions for a few days after the trip just kind of gravitating towards the compositions that just felt right to me now occasionally I have tried to include other elements in the scene sometimes you'll find some some Twigs or sticks that kind of stick through the snow and I've been trying to use them to balance with the subject putting them on on parts of the frame where it feels like there's some Harmony and some balance but for the most part it's just been having a single element one thing in a composition and keeping it really really simple [Music] [Music] one of the things that we've discovered about Hokkaido is that you're very limited to where you can and can't go all of the Farmland here is private and they don't allow you to walk on it so most of the shots that you do have to be kind of from the road side which does limit your composition a little bit but at the same time it means that all of these wonderful scenes have got no footprints around them the this the Landscapes here are completely pristine because people aren't allowed to walk there or ski there or go there with snowmobiles so while it can be a little bit frustrating because you see these scenes that you really want to kind of walk and walk up a hill and get a slightly different elevation and you're not allowed to it does mean that you get very very clean compositions with no Footprints and no kind of mess in the snow [Music] [Music] it's also incredibly cold here the temperatures are regularly minus 20 or even colder but fortunately there's no wind to kind of really cut into you it's just just cold so as long as you've got lots of layers on you're good but we've been spending the entire day out shooting we're at from pretty much from first light until last light so by the end of the day you're pretty tired after standing around in the cold all day and then of course there the snow throughout the day we regularly get big clouds come along and and dump snowfall on us which is nice because it makes the scenes much more minimal but you kind of have to work out how you're going to um compose for that so been doing different things I've been kind of increasing the iso to be able to get faster shutter speed something like about one over 100 one over 120 which allows me to freeze the snowflakes a little bit or just using slightly more regular shutter speed it's like 1 over 10 1 over 20 where you get these the the snow blurring through the uh through the image and of course working in the snow the camera the lens it's all weather sealed but you do have to be careful because snowflakes do settle on the front element and then they turn into water drops which of course you're going to see on the image when you look at it on the screen even if you can't necessarily see it through the viewfinder on the LCD screen it wasn't just minimal lone trees while we were in Hokkaido we did spend some time in other parts of the island around the fishing ports and also down in Lake Toyo where I shot this peer image as well as having an incredible morning at this Lake where the Rising Sun backlit the trees and the Mist on the [Music] [Applause] water so that's it for Hokkaido it's been a really really fantastic trip I've really really enjoyed being in this country country really enjoyed the culture the incredible people here it really is a wonderful place to spend time and I'm really excited about going back home and seeing the images but before we go home I'm going to going to head to Tokyo for a few days and spend some time there doing street photography I really want to do some some time in the streets at night shooting the neon signs but for kaido for this video that's it so I hope it's been interesting uh if you enjoyed the video please like And subscribe it really does help the channel and if you enjoy my photography and you'd like to join me on a trip like this i' run workshops all all over the world we'll be coming back to Hokkaido next year we've got workshops in Namibia in Utah in the aord in Madera so you can find all the information on all my workshops on my website so check that out and and get back to me if you have any questions and yeah thanks so much for watching good luck with all your photography and I'll see you next time take care [Music] [Applause] [Music]