Archer in Competition, Nikko, Japan, 2005

Added 1537300778 by Dave Rudin.

"When life deals you lemons, make lemonade."

During my 2005 trip to Japan, I made a couple of day trips from Tokyo to Nikko to see and photograph the annual festival held in honor of the great shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. One of the activities was an archery competition in which archers dressed in full regalia would have to ride on horses at full gallop and shoot their arrows at wooden targets along the course. I wanted to get some photographs of the action, but as it was an overcast day and the area was in the shade, I knew that it would be impossible to use a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action, should I be able to focus precisely on such a fast moving object (which was unlikely).

So, I just decided to go with the flow (almost literally) and use the pan-and-blur technique, with a shutter speed of around 1/15th of a second, as I recall. Of course, using film as I did (and still do), I had no idea what the results were until I developed the film weeks later. I was actually pretty happy with the results when I saw them, with a number of good images from the one roll of 120 film that I used, but this one is my favorite.