#109 A View of Shibaura

the 109th views in Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Famous 100 Views of Edo” is A View of Shibaura. Here is the original picture.

It is said that this was painted to celebrate the restoration of the Shogun’s Hamagoten Villa (now Hamarikyu) which was destroyed in the Ansei earthquake. As of the end of 2024, you cannot see the Shibaura area from Hamarikyu, so please allow us to change the location slightly to the area around Takeshiba Pier, and here is the modern scenery.

The stone walls and pine forests along the coast have been replaced by ports and distribution facilities, and the fishing boats have been replaced by water taxi boats, and the seaweed farms and breakwaters that can be seen in the distance have been replaced by the Rainbow Bridge, so the area has changed a lot since then.

But the seagulsl probably still looks the same as it did back then. I think I’ve managed to recreate the coastline scenery, but I’m being a bit too optimistic.

It was the middle of winter, and I was thinking about which of the Famous Views in Edo to choose from the “Winter” section of the original work, but there was a problem. This section is overwhelmingly full of pictures of snowy landscapes, and it’s not easy to take a good photo of them. I thought I could get away with saying “Sorry, this time there’s no snow!” if it was only a little, but I thought it would be annoying to say sorry from the start. So I decided on this picture, which is OK with no snowing.

As a happy side effect, there were many subjects around Takeshiba Pier that caught my eye and I had fun taking pictures of them. Let me list a few of them to liven things up.

A monument of a sailing ship’s mast stands in the square in front of the pier. The international signal flags fluttering in the wind are a heart-pounding sight that leaves no room for questions.

After trying out various ways of developing the RAW data I had taken, I discovered that the LUT “Smoky Color-S” provided by the LUMIX official website worked well for this kind of urban port scenery.