Japan's Snowiest City on Film: What It Actually Takes to Shoot Aomori in February

Shooting film in the snowiest city on Earth is not a casual undertaking. Aomori, Japan, sits at the top of the global rankings for annual snowfall, and photographing it on film, in blizzard conditions, with a scanning workflow you've built from scratch, demands a level of commitment that either produces something special or teaches you something hard.

Coming to you from Teo Crawford, this absorbing video follows Crawford and his partner through a February journey across northern Japan, shooting entirely on film in some of the most demanding winter conditions a photographer can face. Crawford arrives in Aomori to find the city buried so deeply that train services had only just resumed after being shut down by the snow. A station worker tells him he's lucky to have made it at all. Crawford shoots Kodak Gold 200 in the early part of the trip, then switches to Fuji 400 once the light drops too low for the slower emulsion to keep up. The switch matters here because Crawford isn't just chasing aesthetics. He's reacting to real constraints in real time, in freezing temperatures, with his hands going numb.

One of the more practical threads running through the video is Crawford's film scanning setup. He scans at home using a digital camera paired with a compact light box that attaches directly to a lens and lets you shoot each negative as a frame rather than using a flatbed. He brought the whole rig to Japan and scanned on location. What makes this section worth paying attention to is that Crawford is candid about the learning curve, calling the early process genuinely painful before he found a workflow he trusted.

Beyond the gear, the trip itself is the story. Crawford photographs a snow festival north of Hakodate, navigates a blizzard in the historic hot spring town of Ginzan, shares a taxi up a mountain with strangers to see the so-called snow monsters, frozen trees sculpted by relentless wind and cold, and ends the trip at a snow lantern festival in the small city of Yonezawa. Not everything lands the way he hoped. He consistently underexposed by about a stop during the Ginzan shoot, and his long-held dream of seeing the snow monsters in clear sunshine doesn't come true. The crowd is also larger than he anticipated, with a line stretching far beyond the ticket gate before it even opens. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Crawford.