Braved the hordes. It was worth it.
Sanja Matsuri is one of the biggest Shinto festivals in Tokyo, at Asakusa Shrine. It’s a 3 days festival that attracts million of tourists. Like, really a lot. That’s like a lot more visitors than Comiket.
It’s popular for their (very) lively parade of Mikoshi (portable shrines), flutes, dancing, and bajillion of people flooding the streets. If you can’t tell from the pictures, yes, the place was crowded AF.
So crowded that it was quite a challenge to take good photos without random anon occasionally blocking your shots. Me being short doens’t help at all in these kind of crowd.
No surprise some experienced photographers brought portable steps and gained better angles.
Nonetheless, I managed to capture some of the loud and lively atmosphere of the festival; hence, I’m satisfied. Braving the crowd was totally worth it. If you haven’t been to one, I’d highly recommend you to check it out.
Read more about the festival here.
Also, take a look at some of the footages that I took at the event below. Uneditted because I’m just rushing these out of the window for now. I’ll replace the video in the future.
All of these photos with taken with my new Sony Alpha A7 Mark III. Yeah, took that new beast for a spin. Many apologies if my skills were far too inadequate to tame the beast. Still warming up to it.
Since it’s a new camera, had to create new colour grade for lightroom; had a lot of fun toying around with the wider dynamic range that I never had with my E-P5. Applied it to most of the photos and fine tuned each before publishing it.
Photo drops ahead; a lot of photos, so I hope it doesn’t kill your internet quota haha.
I am extremely satisfied with my new gear, it really exceeded my expectations.
There will more festivals in Tokyo soon, and I’ll be prepared next time: I’ll bring a monopod for a better vantage point.