Travel Tuesday is Back Today!

A bunch of years ago when Canon USA knew who I was and liked me—I still use their cameras, though— the company invited me on a press trip to Japan that launched the original 6.3-megapixel EOS Digital Rebel.

After a stopover in San Francisco, ee landed in Narita International Airport, which is one of two international airports serving Tokyo, the other one being Haneda. It’s located 37 miles east of central Tokyo and is the busiest airport in Japan for international passenger and international cargo traffic. If you think Chicago’s O’Hare airport is big, Narita is, as Al Jolson once said (Google him) “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

This was my first and only visit to the East, so far anyway, and while, with a few exceptions, I was not fond of the cuisine, I enjoyed the people and the environment both in Tokyo and in travels around the country. Canon USA was so nice that they arranged for me to attend The Tokyo Motor Show where I got to make a lot of great photographs of cars (and models), some of which I plan to show in an upcoming #traveltuesday post or maybe on #wheelswednesday. I also enjoyed having the opportunity to meet with and hang out with the wonderful and hospitable people from Canon USA and Japan along with some other writers—calling us journalists seems pretentious—a few who became lifelong friends.

The Camera

The Digital Rebel aka the EOS 300D in the rest of the world except in Japan where it was known as the Kiss! What a great name. Back in the film days, the Rebel name had been a winner for Canon so the company brought it back for the USA instead of using a designation like 300D that sounds like it belongs on the back of a diesel-powered German sedan.

The Digital Rebel included what, at the time, was a high-speed seven-point wide area autofocus with continuous shooting at  2.5 frames per second for a burst of up to four shots. The camera had a CMOS (22.7 x 15.1mm) sensor giving it a 1.5x multiplication factor. (Please don’t call it a crop sensor.) It had the the ability to record JPEG images in one of six formats or as a 12-bit RAW file. When a RAW image was captured the cameras would simultaneously record and store a JPEG image (Medium/Fine) within the RAW data,

How I Made this photograph: Rather than show some traditional travel shots of Japan—if you want, you can see some of them here, here and here—I wanted to share some slice-of-life photographs, snapshots if you will, that I made during this trip.

If you want to buy a used car in Tokyo where would you go? To the Cow-Cow, what else. On the lot, you’ll find a Nissan Presea, that’s Spanish for “jewel,” which is a compact car  produced for the Asian market from 1990 to 2000. It competed with the entry-level luxury 4-door sedans that were popular in Japan during the 1990s, notably the Toyota Corolla Ceres, Honda Integra, and the Mazda Lantis. Nope I never heard of any of those cars either.

The image was made while I was hanging out the window of a tour bus with a Canon EOS Digital Rebel—’Natch—with the EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens. I made two shots, this horizontal version and a vertical. I like the horizontal version, you can call it the “landscape: version, if you like. My grab shot standard Program mode exposure was 1/200 sec at f/10 and ISO 200. Image was lightly tweaked in Vivenza.

PS. During this trip I also had the opportunity to make one of the many photographic mistakes that are immortalized in my Stupid Photographer’s Tricks series, You can read all about me getting soaking wet and photographing a beautiful news reporter in Tokyo here.