Final Frame (pre-COVID-19)
Little did I know when I was in Japan in December of 2019, that it would be my last international trip for years.
We all know the COVID-19 story — we’ve all been living it — so I won’t go into long explanations, etc. of how our lives have changed. We all have our own versions of the same story. Some much worse than others. Luckily my story is not so bad, compared to many.
I’ll tell more about my 2020 in coming posts, but — for now — I just wanted to look back and see what was the absolute last shot I took on international soil, before I was grounded for (at least) a year. (If I had to guess, it’s probably going to be more like 2 years, minimum.)
So here it is — my last international travel photo before the pandemic shut things down:
It’s a view of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Rambling Road and Mushashino Street as seen from the elevated National Route 20 near Shinjuku Station.
I’ve always been fascinated by the first and last shots from any given trip. My first shot (not counting phone photos) often seems to be the view from a hotel window. I’ve never mastered packing my bag to have the camera easily available immediately after a long series of flights, so that’s often my first opportunity to fire off a “real” frame. Last shots vary, but you never really know if it’s the last shot, do you? While first shots are predictable, last shots are often odd frames that you maybe even wonder why you took it. For me, at least, the “end of a trip” in terms of photography is not a known event until you’re boarding that flight home and everything is securely packed away once more.
On this particular trip to Japan, I overnighted the last night in Tokyo and the flight was late enough that I had a morning to walk around. To be honest, my main goal during that walk was to look for the oddly-flavored KitKat bars that Japan is known for. That’s what determined my route — I was looking for a large KitKit shop that I had heard was nearby the hotel.
As it turns out, I never found the shop, but it did lead me through some interesting areas of the Shinjuku neighborhood. As I recall, I traveled light. Much of my bag was already packed but I took my Nikon D850 and an old Nikkor 28-105 lens, as I figured it would cover all my bases as a wide-to-tele walk-around lens.
I only took 23 frames that morning, and I didn’t really think much about this shot as I took it, if memory serves. I remember being taken with the brightly colored “Green Peas” building, and probably just grabbed the shot as a way to remember the city’s boldness and vibrance. The rest of the walk back to the hotel was not long — I’d stayed fairly close to the train station — but it was a repeat of what I’d seen on my way out so I must have not seen anything in any better light than I’d already seen it earlier that morning.
Back in the room, I finished packing up the camera bag and didn’t give another thought to what had been my last frame. My last travel photo pre-pandemic. I’ve shot a many photos in the year since, but little in the way of travel photography, and certainly nothing of the international variety. I’ll share more about how I spent my 2020 “photographically” in future posts.
Oh — and the little thumbnail photo of the airport that most likely led you to this page, was one of those “first shots.” It was the first photo I’d ever taken in Japan, when I had a stop in Tokyo on my way to South Korea in 2006. It had been a long, over-night flight from Chicago and bleary-eyed me took this out of the airport window with a little Panasonic point and shoot that I used to keep in my pocket for those opportunities when you don’t yet have the big camera out yet. Maybe I should start carrying a little compact again… when we resume traveling…
