Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park

Love Jump JTG


Love Jump JTG, orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by stechico.

I had the plea­sure of tak­ing Kim and Ricky’s Engage­ment pho­tos this past Sun­day. We were ini­tial­ly going to roll to 2 spots: the first was the Japan­ese Tea Gar­den; and the sec­ond was Straw­ber­ry Hill. We actu­al­ly did­n’t get to go to Straw­ber­ry Hill as there were just tons of peo­ple vis­it­ing the Park. And there was nice weath­er to top it off.

Back to our sto­ry. We made our way to the Japan­ese Tea Gar­den just right next to the De Young Muse­um. It’s usu­al­ly free on Mon­days, Wednes­days, and Fri­days if I recall cor­rect­ly; and only $5 per per­son the oth­er days. Not too shab­by.

Upon enter­ing the gates, it com­plete­ly remind­ed me of the great time I had when I vis­it­ed Japan a cou­ple years back. I miss that place—great food, peo­ple and cul­ture. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly in that order, but I’d have to rank the food way up there =)

Mean­while, it was a “par­ty cloudy” day as the fore­cast said but being in the City, it can change pret­ty quick­ly. Luck­i­ly, it stayed like that most of the day and it was­n’t too cold. As you can see… Kim was just chill­in’.

Most of the spots that we took pho­tos inside were great. Either they had great light­ing or was sim­ply bal­anced enough as I did­n’t need to use my flash. As you can tell, I kind of like nat­ur­al light bet­ter at the moment1.

Know­ing this, I just had my ISO set to 100–200 most of the times and was usu­al­ly on f2.8–5.6 depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion. I think I shot on Man­u­al and Av modes fre­quent­ly as well. One of the things I noticed I strug­gled on a bit were when Kim and Ricky had some back­light­ing from the Sun. I was try­ing to get a good bal­ance to expose their faces but also get a good expo­sure on the back­ground. Luck­i­ly, there were only a cou­ple of these shots.

Anoth­er thing I learned from my pre­vi­ous pho­to out­ings is that you should take a hand tow­el or two just in case you’d like to sit your cou­ples on a bench or step. When we went to the Gar­den, I think some bench­es still had some wet spots due to dew and/or the sprin­klers. Hav­ing the towel(s) should come in handy espe­cial­ly when the bride is wear­ing some­thing that can get dirty eas­i­ly. That, or you can use the towel(s) as padding if you are going to shoot from a low-angle and need to have some cush­ion for your knees and/or elbows.

All in all it was a nice shoot. I can hon­est­ly say that the Japan­ese Tea Gar­den almost had the atmos­phere that I have expe­ri­enced in Japan2. I def­i­nite­ly would rec­om­mend going there whether you’d like to just spend a day strolling, tak­ing pho­tos, and/or learn­ing some cul­ture.

  1. Maybe because I’m still read­ing up on Stro­bist. []
  2. Damn, I miss that place. I want to go back. 2010 maybe haha. []

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