Takashi Namiki
Namiki became a freelance photographer after dropping out of Tokyo Photography School (now Tokyo Visual Arts). He shows his photography and writes for various magazines, and teaches at Canon EOS Academy and Olympus Digital College. His main subject has been flowers. He is a member of Japan Professional Photographers Society and Society of Scientific Photography.
Fragrance of Early Summer
For these shots, I tried to capture "summer" in the way that I myself honestly felt it. I suppose that for many, what comes to mind when they think of summer is the dazzling sun and blue sky. But in Japan, which is a long and narrow country, it is possible to see and feel different summers at any given moment, depending on where you are.
It has once again been brought home for me that there are many sights that evoke feelings of summer, even in ordinary and easily overlooked scenery particular to a given place. It may be a mountain with a lingering sense of the rainy season, a breeze flowing across lush green grass, a flower discreetly blooming unseen in a forest, or a dragonfly bringing with it a hint of autumn. I believe what allowed me to take these photographs was the fact that in Japan, the changing of the seasons is felt so distinctly.
Feedback on having used 18-270mm (Model B008)
The shortness of the minimum focus distance over the entire zoom range enabled me to change the subject size and make use of the blurring effects through the kind of an approach that I might have with a macro-zoom lens even at an angle where I was unable to change the shooting position. All of the photographs for this project were taken with a handheld camera, and I found that the VC (Vibration Compensation) was even more effective than I had anticipated.
