The following morning I sampled Tokyo’s traditional side. At the Yanaka area, I sauntered past tree-lined walkways and old Japanese houses, capturing the their timeless mood with the DSC-S60 set to “sepia” and “BW” mode. Later on, I photographed a traditional court dance at the Kanda Myojin temple, the dancers’ graceful movements filling my mind’s eye with visions of ages past.

Any notions of ancient Japanese culture being all calm and quiet, though, were erased when I witnessed the Sanja Matsuri Festival a few days later at the Asakusa district. This event was a delightful dose of visual overload with its costumed mikoshi shrine-carrying devotees, painted geishas, tattooed Yakuza gangsters and robe-clad Shinto priests all lumped together in one massive, cheerful sea of humanity.

I plowed through this crowd with the DSC-S60 – an easy task considering my minimal equipment – documenting the revelry up close. Thanks to the HDPS-M10, I had no worries about running out of storage space: in the midst of the action I simply slotted in my filled memory stick, shooting with the another while the hard disk downloaded the images (a blindingly fast 5 mb/second transfer speed ensured that it was over in less than a minute!).

By the time my trip ended I had several hundred megabytes worth of photos. Through it all, the HDPS-M10,and the DSC-S60 both stood up to the constant use, storing and capturing crisp, high-quality images with utmost ease.

For me, two-sided Tokyo was indeed a city of contrasts – and a memorable shooting experience.