I thought that I would share a photo from our recentish (November 13) visit to Japan.
One of the places I most wanted to see was Hiroshima. Cold war history has always fascinated me, and this is possibly one of the places that gave birth to the cold war. The city itself was pretty nice and apart from knowing its history you could be forgiven for thinking it was not too spectacular (although you'd have to avoid any museum and not head to the river when there to escape its terrible past!).
One of the things that sticks in my mind about the events of the 6 August 1945 was the bomb damage assessment photos showing a ravaged city apart from one or two buildings. The A-bomb dome is one of those and after many years and much arguments was saved as an everlasting memorial to that day.
There were many ways to photograph the dome but this is the one I settled on to share, I wanted to create a feeling of being there that fateful morning, so I tried for ages to get a photo using the sun to simulate the detonation. Now I must confess before any history buffs jump on me this photo was actually taken from the direction of ground zero (some 100m behind me) and so is not a very good reconstruction!
To create this effect I used my sigma 10-20mm on my 7D and shot at ISO100, at f13 1/125 with -2/3 exposure compensation. This allowed me to expose the brightly lit parts of the building and foreground well whilst maintaining the deep shadows behind and gave a tolerable burn out in the sky to simulate the fireball. Post has been simple, a crop and addition of the watermark.
The Japanese call bomb survivors hibakusha and they have a simple saying: "I met with the A-bomb". Visiting the city and the peace gardens and museum is a strangely numbing affair and perhaps I felt a minute part of how the people of the city felt that morning, perhaps this photo will do the same for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment