Festivals across Japan add color to the summer. When you hear the word “Yosakoi,” what kind of scene comes to mind? As a reporter from Hokkaido, I’ve attended the “YOSAKOI Soran Festival” in Sapporo, and dancing the Soran-bushi at school sports days is a regular tradition—it’s as familiar to me as the “Bon Odori.” While Yosakoi culture has spread beyond Hokkaido to all corners of Japan, its origins lie in the “Kochi Yosakoi Festival,” which was launched in 1954 and will mark its 72nd year in 2026. On August 11, I participated in a special photography tour of the “Kochi Yosakoi Festival” organized by DJI JAPAN and visited the Otesuji Main Competition Arena—the festival’s main venue—for the first time. For this assignment, instead of the mirrorless camera and telephoto lens I usually use, I used the “Osmo Pocket 4P,” a palm-sized gimbal camera released by DJI at the end of June. Featuring a 1-inch sensor that performs well in low light and powerful image stabilization, as well as—for the first time in the series—a medium-telephoto lens (equivalent to 60mm, up to 240mm with digital zoom) and a wide-angle lens (equivalent to 20mm)—a first for the series. It is said to truly shine at the “Yosakoi Festival at Night,” where the contrast between dazzling lights and shadows is particularly striking.
Scene 1: A close-up of a dancer’s beaming smile in a vertical short video. From the elevated viewing area (paid reserved seating), which offers a wide view of the venue, the main focus is on capturing the dancers’ lively expressions. With the Osmo Pocket 4P, you can quickly switch zoom levels using the zoom button and custom button hidden behind the device’s screen. For this shoot, I kept the screen in landscape orientation to access both buttons and tilted the camera body 90 degrees to the left (so the screen was portrait-oriented). I shot in 4K at 60 fps with automatic exposure and white balance. For the color mode, I selected “Normal” instead of “D-Log” (which requires editing), to make it easier to extract still images from the video. Even from the top row of the bleachers, using a medium-telephoto lens with 6x to 12x digital zoom (equivalent to 120–240mm) makes it possible to fill the frame with a single dancer. This is a recommended shooting method for capturing the dancers’ energetic expressions and their meticulously crafted costumes.
© Source travel watch