The Shinjuku Gyoen Chrysanthemum Festival is an annual highlight for photographers in Tokyo. While the displays are a tradition dating back decades, my visit in 2020 remains one of my most memorable shoots due to the incredible lighting conditions. It was another great event for Japanese flower photographers.
Autumn 2020 photo conditions
Shinjuku Gyoen is always lovely, but 2020 was special. Beautiful skies and cool temperatures combined to make it a fantastic day. I doubt I had ever seen better conditions at the park for chrysanthemums. It was perfect.
And the crowd? It is always laid back with a mostly older group of people. A few younger couples seemed to be there on dates, and they were in the mix, too. Some photographers, including myself, were thrown in for good luck.
The flowers were the stars, though. They were in full bloom and beautifully displayed. There were many types, including the edo-giku, ozukuri, and kengai.
My photo gear for this shoot
Photographing the chrysanthemums was a fun challenge. Tripods aren’t allowed near the displays, which means everything has to be shot handheld. Many of the blooms are housed inside shaded booths, so I found my Godox V850II flash to be essential. For this shoot, I relied on my Fujifilm X-T2 with the versatile XF 16-55mm lens for wide shots of the displays, and the XF 55-200mm to isolate individual blossoms.
Ozukuri and kengai flower styles
The flowers were the stars, in full bloom and beautifully displayed. The ozukuri are famous large domes several meters across. They were first created when the park was the Shinjuku Imperial Botanical Garden. My favorite was the kengai, or cascade style, where flowers are shaped to look like they are flowing down a cliff.
The Shinjuku Gyoen gardening staff
Even though I had been to the festival many times, Shinjuku Gyoen Chrysanthemum Festival 2020 was the first time I had seen the park staff tend the plants. But, this time, they were there! Maybe my timing had just been wrong. Their work intrigued me. Some of them pushed carts filled with a variety of gardening implements like rakes, cans, straw brooms, and long pieces of bamboo. An arrangement of knives and small saws hung from their toolbelts. The ones I saw spent their time pruning the ozukuri.
The festival was a beautiful experience for flower lovers and photographers. Luckily, it will return next year. To learn more about this venue, please look at [Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden].
