Alfie Goodrich made this photo in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park on a day in late November a few years ago. “The trees in the park at that time of year are compelling,” he says. “You just want to go out and take pictures of them.”

You’re looking straight up into the afternoon sky, but because Alfie had a DR-6 right-angle viewfinder on his D300, it was easy to compose the photo.

His liking for the finder comes from growing up with twin-lens reflex cameras. “I tend to use right-angle finders on my Nikons to get low angles,” he says, “but they’re also very good for looking straight up; I can stare up into the trees to my heart’s content. And when I shoot in the streets with a right-angle finder, it puts the vanishing point in the middle of the frame, rather than always looking down on things from head height. With all the pictures being taken and shared around the world, sometimes having a different viewpoint is all it takes to make people look a little longer at your picture.”

Alfie, a British freelance photojournalist and photography instructor living in Tokyo, used an AF-S Zoom-NIKKOR 80-200mm f/2.8D ED lens for the image and shot at 1/320 second, f/2.8 and ISO 200 with the camera set for manual exposure and spot metering. He also chose manual focus so the lens wouldn’t be hunting.

His twin-lens days were partly responsible for the crop—”I like the esthetic of a square”—but the main reason was his feeling that the gap through the leaves to the sky would work best if it were centered. In this image he was looking not for good patterns of leaves, but rather “a gap through to the sky—the frame within the frame. I focused on the lower-level leaves, so my subject is fairly close, and the wide aperture and compression of the zoom contributed to the look of the photo.”

Shortly after the March 11 tsunami, Alfie donated four of his photos, including this one, to Flickr’s Charity Print Auctions to help children made homeless or orphaned by the disaster.