Blog | Jakob Berr Photography

The Zenshuji Soto Mission in Little Tokyo held a memorial service today for the victims of the recent earthquake and tsunami that devastated north-eastern Japan. Photographing the ceremony was incredibly hard. There was next to no light, and even on ISO 2,500 I was still struggling to get anything at all. I did not want to use a flash because I didn’t want to disrupt the service – and paid my dues. I don’t have a single usable picture that shows the congregation coming in front of the altair and offering candles.

Anyways, here’s what I got. If you have any ideas what I could have done differently, I’d be eager to hear them!

Yesterday I went to church with Valeria and her granddaughters. I had joined them before, but didn’t really like the pictures I came back with. With the way the church is set up, it’s hard to get a telling image. A low ceiling, a row of columns along the middle of the room, fluorescent light in the main room and tungsten in the altair room all make photographing in the building a virtual nightmare. This shoot went better than the first one, however, and I guess I’ll just have to come to terms with the fact that this is the most I can get out of this situation.

The congregation is quite small, with maybe 40 to 50 regular attendants.

Valeria makes it a point to highlight sections in her bible that the pastor talks about in his sermons.

Valeria talks to her pastor after service.

I’ve done a re-edit of the story on hospice care, cutting out about half a minute and making it a little more to the point (at least I think that’s what I did…). Please let me know if you think it works better this way!

Joseph Snow, 78, is suffering from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), an incurable, progressive lung disease that causes severe breathing difficulties. After several trips to the emergency room and a severe pneumonia that he only barely survived, Joe’s doctor told him that it was time to go on hospice, a recommendation that is usually given to patients with a life expectancy of less than six months. That was in June, 2008. Since then, thanks mainly to the competent and compassionate care he received from his hospice nurses, Joe’s condition has improved dramatically. Today, despite his still terminal condition, Joe is enjoying every minute of his life together with his wife Pat and their family. Besides their love, the great force that keeps him going is his unswerving faith. As one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Joe believes that after his death he is going to be resurrected into a cleansed earth. “I have no desire to go to heaven. I don’t know what I would do if I went to heaven,” he says. “This is where I belong – on the earth. I don’t belong in heaven.”