How did you get started in photography? : The pleasures that I discovered.

10 min readDec 20, 2021

I was interviewed for an article to be published in a web magazine. This is a reconstructed version of that interview. In this interview, I summarize the episode that started my journey as an apprentice expressionist when I discovered the joy of clicking the shutter.

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How did you get started in photography?

When I was drowning in the pleasure of clicking the shutter of my camera, that was the moment I became euphoric about the world of photography. At that moment, the camera had become an accomplice to the joy of connecting me with photography.

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A Polaroid camera I had at home.

It was a time when I was cuddled up to my mother and spoiled. In the toy box, there was a black, square Polaroid camera. I pressed the 1cm-long shutter button until it was in position, and the lens shutter made a small cracking sound. I remember the visual focus of the lens, which was about 5 cm in diameter.

I think I carried the camera around proudly, clicking the shutter without even inserting any film. It was the first camera I used in my life. It was the first camera in my life that taught me the joy of releasing the shutter even before I could remember.

First photo shoot.

It was when I was four years old and we were on a family vacation. We were at a drive-in at the top of Mt. Yahiko, a sacred mountain in central Niigata Prefecture. On that day, my father was carrying a small Konica camera around his neck; I think it was a shutter priority one, except for the ISO setting, and it had a dial for eyeballing the focus.

My family of three was taking a break on a bench. I was curious about my father’s camera. Then came the moment of my first photo shoot. My father lent me his camera and I took some pictures with it.

The first photo I remember in my life was of a motorcycle coming up a mountain pass.

In my mind, I was supposed to be able to take a cool picture with the auto bike as the centerpiece. However, the resulting photo was so small that I couldn’t see where the auto bike was, and I remember being disappointed.

Suddenly, I became interested in diorama photography.

This was when I was seven years old. It was the dawn of the Gunpla era. It was also around this time that Dragon Quest 1 was released.

I was fascinated by a mook book on diorama photography that I saw in a bookstore. A diorama is a model of a scene. In the book, there were techniques for photographing various dioramas using plastic models of Gundam and other characters to make them look like scenes from anime.

But I was seven years old. There was no way I could make it happen. However, it was at this time that I learned the joy of creating photographs. This led to my yearning for a single-lens reflex camera.

It was at my younger brother’s kindergarten field day that I made my debut as a photographer.

It was when I was eight years old. I was eight years old when my father asked me to be the exclusive photographer for my younger brother’s kindergarten field day. The reward I was expecting was that my father would be overjoyed and praise me.

So I took my little Konica camera and ran out onto the field. A few days later, when my father saw the developed photo prints, he was furious with me.

The picture was not of my brother, but of a child I did not know. I had taken it in desperation, without any regard for the danger. But because of that photo, my father was angry with me. He told me, “I will never let you touch my camera again. I still remember the feeling of despair I felt at that time.

Even now, whenever I am asked to take a picture at a school event, I remember that moment. And I also remember my father’s face turning red with anger. When I think about it calmly, it was a mistake made by an 8-year-old child. Looking back now, I think it was my father’s fault for not explaining it properly.

Why was your father so angry?

In other words, my father just wanted me to take a picture of my brother. But I wanted to take pictures of the field day, so I did. In the end, the reward my father gave me was “a bitter memory that I will never forget.

I failed miserably with my first SLR.

This was when I was ten years old. I built a mighty diorama of about 1.5 square meters in my yard. By combining various plastic models, I tried to recreate the desolate wilderness after the war. However, it is on the embankment of the garden I will be landscaping. I couldn’t leave it there forever.

So I decided to take pictures of the diorama with my SLR camera that I had been saving for a long time. I thought my father would get angry if I talked to him about it, so I took out my SLR without any prior knowledge and set out to take pictures.

That camera was a famous machine from the past. It was the Olympus OM-1New.

I managed to get the film in the camera. Then I put on the telephoto zoom and started shooting. I was crazy about taking pictures. I had a perfect picture in my mind when I took the picture. Then I developed the prints.

The resulting print was out of focus, blurry, and super underexposed. Even the person who took the picture had no idea what was in the picture. At the time, I didn’t know how to focus, adjust the exposure, or set the ISO. I didn’t know anything.

My first photography trip.

This is a story about when I was 12 years old. I joined a Hokkaido tour with a friend, which was only open to elementary and junior high school students. This was my first photography trip. I asked my father if I could bring a single-lens reflex camera with me. But of course he refused, so I brought my Konica camera.

We took a boat trip on a large ferry. I remember taking many pictures of the sunset over the Sea of Japan. The image in my brain when I took them was a wonderful photo, capturing the moving scene beautifully.

However, that was with a 28mm compact camera with a single focal length lens. The resulting sunset photo only showed a small circle floating on the ocean.

My second photography trip.

It was when I was 15 years old. Junior high school students in Nagaoka City, Niigata Prefecture, where I live, go on a school trip in the spring of their third year of junior high school. At that time, the standard trip was to Kyoto and Nara for three days and two nights. I was one of them.

At that time, I was a sad junior high school student who wanted to stand out but could not. I thought I could stand out if I brought my SLR camera with me, so I took my father’s camera without permission, ready to get angry. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to operate it. I remember that I was taught how to use it by the photographer who accompanied me during the trip.

During the school trip, we were divided into small groups and had work sessions. I was appointed as the recorder. It was a chance for me, who usually doesn’t stand out, to stand out.

However, the pictures I took at that time were not well received.

The trauma of being eight years old again.

Once again, I repeated the same mistake. At the time, I didn’t know why it was so unpopular. As I got older and looked at more travel photos of other people, I realized the reason.

There are two important elements to a typical travel photo.

The photo must prove that you actually went to the place. It is important that the place and you are in the photo.
It should be a record of a special scene. It should be of a spectacular scenery, a scene, or something that can only be captured by going there.

Many of the photos I took on the school trip were unimportant. In other words, I was not able to fulfill my role as a record keeper. It was just like my brother’s kindergarten field day. There was nothing left but self-satisfaction.

However, those self-satisfied photos opened a new door for me.

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The path to becoming an apprentice expressionist.

Through the photographs documenting the school trip, I came to understand two things.

What I wanted to capture was something unique, not a typical concept.
The fun of creating a picture in the viewfinder.

What is the school trip I wanted to photograph?

I misunderstood the school trip as a playground where I could shoot what I wanted to shoot. I thought it was a selfish photography trip using the school trip as an excuse.

It was only natural that it was unpopular.

However, this episode led me to take up photography in earnest. It was the joy of being able to take pictures of what I wanted to take, and the joy of having a weapon to express it.

When I was little, my most favorite plaything was white paper.

I’m not sure when I remember it, but I think I was around 3 or 4 years old. My mother, who was a nurse, used to take me sketching at a nearby riverbed on her occasional days off. My memories of that time are vivid.

At first, I was bored out of my mind. However, I gradually grew to like drawing as well. The reason is simple. It was because I was often praised when I drew pictures. Perhaps, I was drawing pictures because I wanted to be praised. This kind of creative activity gradually led to many other things. I once wrote a novel in my notebook. I also became fond of printmaking and calligraphy.

However, as I grew older, I began to feel uncomfortable with drawing on white paper. Thinking about it now, I feel like I am drowning in the space of painting. I began to feel that the image inside me would not fit on the white canvas.

Gradually, I began to search for a way to express myself in a way that would satisfy my heart.

What I wanted to photograph in Kyoto and Nara.

In the Japanese history that I learned in my compulsory education, Kyoto and Nara were positioned as the centers of ancient history. In visiting these cities, I wanted to capture the time of history.

In the history I have studied, and in the timeline I am living in, Kyoto and Nara are capitals that existed long before I was born. There was an actual flow of time there that I had never imagined before.

I wanted to capture that time.

Create a picture in the viewfinder.

With the advent of digital cameras, photography has taken on a different vector than it did in the heyday of film cameras. As a result, the meaning of the viewfinder has also changed.

In this article, we will talk about the time when film cameras were still used. This is what I learned about the appeal of photography at that time.

It was a process of customizing the reality through the viewfinder in my brain, and using the camera and technology to fix it into a photograph.

I was hooked on this process. But you can’t move on to the next step while you are absorbed in this work. It would be a long time before I learned that fact.

This episode led me to an apprenticeship as a photographic expressionist, when I was 15 years old.

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However, the photographic expression I envisioned at that time was nothing more than an arbitrary drawing on a white piece of paper. Next, I would like to write about the episode that leads to the next step.