Today I took my daughter to Zenkoji Temple located in Nagano city Japan. It was a rather cold morning today, but we were both excited to get out and walk around the temple grounds. Today there seemed to more tourists arriving than usual, so it actually turned out to be a rather busy day. In this particular shot, my daughter Aily was fascinated with the pine cones she had been collecting as we walked around the temple grounds. People from all over had their attention set on the large temples whereas my daughter seemed to only care about a simple little pine cone. Here she climbed the steps of one of the famous temples, sat down in a small corner, and proceeded to take out her favorite pine cone. The shot was taken with a Nikon D200 and a 70-200VR zoom lense. I chose to make the background black and white for two reasons. First, the background was already pretty dark as there were no lights on in the temple, and second I felt it enhanced the pine cone a bit more. It’s amazing how you can enhance objects by simply eliminating background or foreground color.

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Lab Color is something I’ve been experimenting with. This photo may not be a good example, but I thought I would mention the fact that Lab color was used. This shot was very difficult because it was taken during a very very sunny high contrast day. Looking back it probably was not a good time to take pictures without some sort of diffuser or scrim to cut down on the brightness. However, as you can see it was a very important day being a celebration of 3 year olds in Japan, so I had to make it work. What I thought worked well was making the background black and white and then bringing the subject out with color. This seemed to reduce the brightness of the overall photo and in a way add clarity to the subject. This is a very widely used technique, but it’s not something I think about. The photograph was taken with a Nikon D200 and 17-55mm lense.

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