One of the things about shooting travel photography, especially for inflight magazines, is that there is a lot of material that doesn’t get used. This is the first in a series of articles about the out-takes that occur when on assignment.
In June of 2015, I travelled to Hyogo Prefecture to shoot a story on Kobe beef for SAS Airlines magazine. Some of the inflight magazines give me an idea of how many pages the article will be before I go away. This time that didn’t happen. I had a list of things to cover, people to visit and shoot. It would be a fairly busy trip, covering almost 1000kms of Hyogo and Tottori Prefectures in three days.
I’d been to a few parts of Hyogo before but never along all of the northern coastline and that was my favourite part of the trip.
Here’s what SAS Airlines’ magazine used from my shots taken on the trip:
The Takeno and Kasumi coastlines are part of a Geopark that stretches along the entire northern border of Hyogo and into Tottori. I’d been in Kinosaki Onsen to shoot the shop that sells the beef from the first farm I’d shot and from Kinosaki it was a fairly short drive up onto the coast.
The road is beautiful, winding and exciting to drive. Each curve brings a new vista into sight and there are some truly amazing places that I found. I hope, soon, to go back and to try and run a photo workshop in the area as there are many sights which would make excellent places to shoot landscape and fashion.
Tottori was somewhere I’d only ever quickly been through and it was my first time at the famous sand dunes. I’ll be aiming to go back there for a shoot of my own soon, too.
Takeda Castle was the highlight of the return trip to Kyoto back through Hyogo after my second farm shoot. It’s an amazing sight, quite a walk from the top car-park and rewarded me with some excellent views and a good workout!
As well as the stuff that got into the SAS magazine, I used a bunch of shots from the trip along with an interview with the chef of the Park Hyatt, Tokyo, in the magazine I recently designed and produced for Housing Japan. You can see that here. The Kobe Beef story starts on pp41.
A gallery of the out-takes from my trip to Hyogo and Tottori:
