I love shooting at night in Japan for many reasons – firstly, the city never sleeps so there’s always something interesting to photograph; secondly, the quality and layout of the light itself is interesting – their designers obviously pay a lot of attention to this; finally, it’s easy to achieve high image quality. There’s simply so much light it’s rarely necessary to venture into the higher ISO regions, so you can actually get some tonally very rich images covering a large dynamic range with little noise and reasonable shutter speeds. It was better in the pre-Fukushima days when electricity was abundant in Japan; I remember being surprised that in late 2008 I could seriously shoot ISO 200 at night, handheld.

Needless to say, on my last trip, I did plenty of roaming the streets after dark. Here is a collection of my favourite images in that theme. Enjoy! MT

This set was shot with an Olympus OM-D with the 12/2 and 45/1.8 lenses, and a Sony RX100.

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