Week 5: The Light of Japan by Takehito Miyatake

Monday, August 18, 2014 Ching Lea Yee 0 Comments

For Exercise 2 "Light as a subject", I wanted to use long exposure photographs to capture light trails of moving cars in the busy streets of central Singapore at night. I feel that long exposure photography is something that has the potential to create some amazing results. I don't think that Singapore has such beautiful nature landscapes like Japan in these photographs that combine nature with long exposure photographs so my only choice was to capture man-made light sources.

In this series, photographer Takehito Miyatake captures long-exposure photographs of volcanos erupting, beaches adorned with bioluminescent creatures and fireflies that light up the night sky. Miyatake believes these photographs are parallels to Waka, a type of short Japanese poetry that focuses on the minute moments of beauty mother nature has to offer that better help us reflect and comprehend the world around us.

When interviewed by Time magazine Takehito chronicled his connection between Waka, Japanese poetry and his own style of nature photography.


“Waka is a poem to express the scope of nature, by using limited words since its birth in the eighth century in Japan. The method has been working beautifully and precisely to express nature with sympathy. I believe Waka is very similar to nature photography”