Colorful Flowers Bring Crowds to Nezu Shrine
Colorful flowers bring crowds to Nezu Shrine. They certainly do. The vibrant red, purple, pink, and white azaleas are a people pleaser. But they can give photographers like me problems. I came up with a solution for them in 2025.
I went on a Monday, expecting fewer people to be there. How wrong I was. Every man and his dog turned out for the azaleas. I’d never seen so many people on the hill. Hundreds had come. Dare I say thousands?
Was it only the colorful flowers that drew them? Maybe not. Nezu Shrine probably had a part to play. It has stood for more than 400 hundred years. The building is attractive with history attached. During the festival, stalls sell Japanese street food and other goods. Azaleas are even on sale.
With an enormous crowd, photographing the azaleas was a challenge. I put myself in the line of people and took photos when possible. This year, I did something different to photograph the colorful flowers.
Did you read my Nezu Shrine Azalea Festival article from 2024? No? Well, I mentioned that a woman uses a neutral density filter. I copied her this year. Why did I do that?
Photographing colorful flowers with an ND filter
When the sun is too bright for our eyes, we wear sunglasses. Photographers do something similar. They use neutral-density (ND) filters to reduce the light entering the lens. That reduces overexposed photos.
Here’s the tricky part: my flowers were beautifully lit, but the sky was too bright and washed out. A standard ND filter would darken everything, including the flowers. A graduated neutral-density filter was the solution.
What is a graduated neutral-density filter?
This type of filter is dark on the top and clear on the bottom, with a smooth transition between the two. It let me reduce the brightness in the sky while keeping the flowers well-exposed. I had one in my camera bag.
Even better, if I rotate the filter, I can adjust which part of the frame gets the darkening effect. It’s a clever tool—I wish I had discovered it long ago. I owe the inspiration to the woman using one in 2024. Thank you, mystery photographer!
Conclusion
Crowd problems aside, I enjoyed Azalea Festival 2025. The graduated neutral-density filter lets me get better photos of the colorful flowers. It’s a new tool for my photography quiver. By the way, check out my full article about Nezu Shrine too. Leave questions and comments below.
Date photos taken: 21 April 2025
Rohan Gillett
Rohan has been photographing Tokyo since 2011. He shoots it with his Canon EOS R5.
More flower festivals:
External related websites:
- Nezu Shrine (official website)