Middle School Field Trip – Kyoto, Japan

You might recognize this place from yesterday’s post. Yes, it’s the magnificent Kyoto Station building. During my mainly architectural exploration of this place, I squeezed in some street photography. I noticed these middle school students snapping away.

I’m assuming these are middle school students from their youthful innocence, who are most likely on a school field trip. What’s noteworthy, photographically, is that four of them are using old school point and shoots. You don’t see that anymore. Four casual photographers and not a smartphone in sight. Perhaps they are too young to be allowed smartphones? Who knows. But, yup, I took this picture about a month and a half ago, in 2017.

One of them asked me — the dorky middle-aged guy with two Olympus cameras hanging around this neck — to take a picture of them. I complied but the background subject, which I will showcase in tomorrow’s post, along with the students in the foreground was a lot trickier than expected.

You see, the background was extremely bright and the students just formed nice dark silhouettes. Luckily the girl handed me a Canon Powershot S120, an enthusiast’s point and shoot from about four years ago, and I could figure out how to use it. I set it to Aperture mode, dialed down the exposure compensation and turned on the forced flash, which took less than a minute to figure out. The flash properly lit the students and the reduced exposure made sure the background was not overexposed.

The teenagers were suitably impressed and I was happy that I did my photographic good deed for the day. I suppose this is where a good point and shoot, with flexible controls can beat the smartphones. Yes, the smartphones have flashes but they are typically not very strong. The solid and relatively easy Canon Powershot interface also helped me immensely. Ironically, the S120 would have worked better than either of my Olympus cameras since neither of them had an attached flash.