Another important component of any street is the shop window. Through it, I discovered another Japanese “detail”, a great source of inspiration during my Kyoto period. At the same time, it helped me to discover more secrets of the photography craft. With the help of the window displays, I discovered the Japanese dolls. There are several types, generally specific to each region, in the traditional way.  In Kyoto there were some miniature Geisha dolls, meticulously made with a high level of details …. in Japanese style.

Geisha doll portrait in a shop window in Kyoto.

I photographed and admired them on the street through shop windows and at different stalls, and at one point, I decided to buy one. And then, this doll became the main “model” in my small ad- hoc studio from my tatami room, near a temple in central Kyoto.

And in this way, with the help of this doll, I developed my own technique of photographing objects against a white background, a very popular asset at the time  on stock sites. And then, I started to study various types of lighting for portrait photography.  This helped me a lot after a while, when I started photographing real people. Dolls or showcase models are ideal tools to discover the secrets of portrait photography.

The image presented here is not from the studio, but it is one of those made in a real display window. Another idea related to dolls and my Kyoto period was to combine studio photography with real photography. In the studio you can analyse and create different “ideal” situations that you can then be used to successfully and quickly represent highly complex scenes from the real world. I think this is one of my fundamental ideas about photography: the studio is like a crash-test-dummy-lab for your next complex real scenes.