Admiration

Sneak attack from behind!

Tokyo International Forum Redux

I had to go back into my extremely neglected archives so that I can vary my recently posted photos a bit instead of nothing but Turkey, I need to get away from work and go on a trip! That will be Thailand to meet my wife leaving in exactly in one week. This will be a second attempt at getting good pictures in that country as my first one was what prompted me to get a DSLR after my P&S became full of dust particles that ruined almost every picture I took the first time I was there. Anyways, here is another one of my favorite buildings–if not my favorite–in Tokyo, the Tokyo International Forum. The first batch I had processed I went really heavy on the orange hues for some reason. I have quite a few that I shot with a fluorescent white balance under these incandescent lights which gave a very blueish result.

Indecisions

I have been working on the same shot to post to this blog for the past 3 nights in a row and sometimes spending as much as 2 hours on each attempt. Sometimes just staring at it wondering where to go from there. This is my 4th attempt.. I have never deleted more than 1 attempt before, but this time I just couldn’t figure out where to go with it.

The unique thing about this photo is the blue hue which is not HDR, DRI, or any color replace shenanigans. The problem is that I couldn’t decide if it had more potential than I was able to squeeze out of it. I tried HDR, DRI, converting those to B&W, straight B&W, B&W with selective coloring; then I finally decided on just some Lightroom adjustments off of the -1 exposure and a quick trip to Photoshop for some sharpening and cloning out of junk in the water. I am still largely unimpressed, but after all those hours, sometimes you just have to move on with your life!

This is the famous Itsukushima Shrine near Hiroshima on the island of Miyajima during high tide.

Absent

So I just realized it has been about 3 weeks since I have taken a picture or worked on any. I am being bad, I know. I am still living out of a hotel, getting over my initial sickness that most people get when they first get to Turkey, looking for a vehicle armed with very basic knowledge of the local language, and trying to stay in touch with my wife so neither of us end up going crazy being apart for so long.

Hopefully in the next few weeks I can start finding some time and motivation at the end of the day to get back into it. Until then, here is the last shot I posted to Flickr over 3 weeks ago. This is the Kintai-kyo bridge located in Iwakuni. Definitely worth the trip if you happen to be near the Hiroshima area!

Itsukushima Shrine

I had a series of about 8 shots of this Itsukushima Shrine scene and all I had to do was layer the 0 EV exposure onto the +2 EV exposure and paint the bright areas through on the left side of the photograph and I would have had a quick shot that was natural and pleasing to my senses… No, I had to go and create an HDR version on top of the two other exposures, create a couple of other layers for different colors, LucisArt, and a few filters so I could selectively add them to each area. I seriously spent 2 hours trying to figure out were I was going with this and completely hated it, I was about to just trash it when I found the perfect Nik filter that suddenly created a look that I was happy with.

5 Stories of Pagoda

Well I am in Germany now training for my new job and awaiting a work visa for Turkey. I may be here anywhere from 3 weeks up to 4 months. I thought I would quick post up a photo I took of the 5 Story Pagoda at Miyajima. This island was such a cool little spot. The shrine, the temple, the pagoda… All super photogenic. This photo is kind of out there, but I couldn’t really reign in the sky with my current Photoshop skill set.

So an Elk Walks Into a Bar

When you visit Hiroshima, Myajima Island is a must see. I’ll be posting pictures of the shrine later on in life when I try and catch up on my photos, but for now, you get this deer we found on the island. They were all over the areas that the tourists frequent and I was kind of surprised to see everyone just running around and petting them. The deer didn’t care at all, and quite honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some of the kids riding the bucks around.

We were off on an out of the way area sitting down and talking about how nice it would be to live on a beach when this character sneak attacked us ninja style and tried to steal wifey’s travel brochure for the area. No one messes with her travel brochures, I am not even allowed to throw them out at the end of the trip. Well this deer lost his battle with my wife, but he did make off with the corner of a couple of pages. You can see by the look in his eyes, that brochure was damn good!

Genbaku Dome

After Kyoto, we arrived in Hiroshima via the Tōkaidō Shinkansen; the first site we had to go to after checking our bags into the hotel was the Genbaku Dome, otherwise known as the Atomic Bomb Dome. The actual dome was 490ft away from the point of detonation excluding the 1,968 feet above the ground were the bomb known as “Little Boy” was detonated. Ever since that fateful day on August 6, 1945, the shrine has been left almost completely in its’ original state to serve as a memorial to those who died. I was amazed that a building built in April 1915 would even possibly be standing after such an event. You can see that the cracks in the building and the exposed edges have been sealed, but little else has been done.

The Final Push

Since I am leaving Japan a lot sooner than I thought, we have been trying to get out and see as many of the things we had planned on seeing during the last year we were here. This week we did a 3 day 2 night Shinkansen trip from Tokyo to Kyoto and Hiroshima. Quite honestly, it was nice to see all of this, but it is borderline work to jump off the trains, check your baggage at the hotel, and run from place to place trying to be as efficient as possible with so little time! Of course it will all be worth it once we process the photos, but it was a shame to not have more time to enjoy the sites along the way. We rode on the most modern Shinkansen, the N700, but I still think this E4 model pictured below is the coolest looking of them all.

Kyoto was our first destination along the worlds busiest hi-speed rail line, the Tōkaidō line. This line has a top speed of 270 km/h, but the N700 actually moves at 300 km/h (186 mph) on the adjacent Sanyō line. They look fast from the outside as they snake their way along the rails of Japan, but on the inside it is super smooth, and it doesn’t seem like you are really moving all that fast with the lack of noise and eardrum-busting pressure changes that I experienced with the German ICE trains when they enter tunnels. I read that the N700 is pressure sealed and when I was sitting next to the window, my leg could feel the frame of the train expand as it entered the middle of the tunnel and contract back into place as it exited the tunnel. I figure their must be a great deal of negative air pressure as it rushes through the tunnels, but I am no engineer, so that is just my theory..

Gion Shrine-

Kyoto is a breeze to navigate. For only ¥500 (about $5) you can get an unlimited all day city buss pass, and on top of that, they give you a great map with all of the routes and nearby sites. The most difficult part is deciding which shrines to see, and with barely 24 hours to spend in Kyoto and a lot of shrines being closed at night, this made it difficult to see everything that we wanted, but that was our fault. We definitely were able to hit the most famous sites though. I would say the Golden Pavilion is easily one of the most popular sites I see on Flickr. I always thought this was the tackiest shrine I have ever seen, and in person, it still looked tacky, maybe I am just a jerk, but I really wanted to create a different take on this popular site. I think the gold looks perfect when paired with black and white.

The only beef I really had with Kyoto is that you are not allowed to use a tripod at most of the sites. Demonicus, my beloved tripod, was none too happy to hear about this. The bastards that made those rules are lucky they avoided confrontation with him as he pretty much hurts anyone he touches.

Tsubakuro-Dake Twighlight

I haven’t been posting much and I really had to fight with myself to find the motivation to even process this photo real quick. I have roughly 5,000 photos in Lightroom from this year alone that I need to either delete or process and upload and I think this daunting task wears me out just thinking about it! Of course, many shots are multiple exposures, but that means a lot more work to propperly HDR, DRI, or both, then merge with the best exposure.

Here is another shot during our trip to the Japanese Alps taken with the last remaining light of the day, looking towards Tsubakuro-Dake. It was extremely cold by this time and I am highly impressed with the people who decided to sleep in those tents that night. I have never had a warm night camping on snow, and I have never even tried to do it on the edge of a windy ridge.

燕岳 Tsubakuro-Dake

This weekend we did an overnight trip to the Japanese Alps to climb Tsubakuro-Dake. I was amazed, in fact, it makes me quite frustrated to see such an awesome area and have to go back to big-city Tokyo. I would love to be living at the foot of these mountains because they are absolutely spectacular!!! Here is a 3-picture-HDR-stitch panorama taken from the peak, which is 2,763 meters high (9,065 ft.)

We hiked up in a thick mist, which is exactly how I imagined hiking through the mountains of Japan would be, and even hit snow midway up the trail. We really had no clue what the scenery looked like on the way to the hut because of the heavy mist and thick fog near the ridge line on the final push. We ended up staying at a really nice hut that served pretty damn good food. In the evening it cleared up for a little bit and saw the most unexpectedly amazing view, and realized the actual peak was a mere skip and a hop away. Anyways, here is a shot of the Enzanso hut at night with the full moon about to peer through the clouds.

Needless to say, it doesn’t feel right to stay in such a nice building near the top of a mountain, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the food, the comfortable rest, and the warmth since it was really cold at night. My dumbass forgot to check my camera ISO again and took all of my shots @ 800, which is pushing the D80 beyond its’ limit. I didn’t realize this until I was packing to head down. Doh!

I hear this is the easiest hike of all the peaks in the Japanese Alps. This hike wasn’t all that difficult, even in the snow. Below is a picture of the mid-mountain hut that gets supplies via a rickety old tram. I recommend the curry Ramen. I feel kind of bummed I will be leaving soon and will miss out on more trips to this area. If anyone is interested to see some amazing pictures and stories of some sketchy ascents of other peaks in the area; look no further than this blog right here. Just don’t blame me if you suddenly find that you have just lost track of the last couple of hours going through the posts.

Look, But Don’t Touch

When we were in Beijing, we took a quick trip on the subway to see some of the more prominent Olympic venues. The buildings were definitely out of this world, especially at night, with all of the progressive designs that were implemented into these buildings and the amazing color they are lit at night, they were very photogenic. However, Every single building is blocked off with an unsightly fence. This is the best picture I could get of this building, and the closest as well. Maybe they open the gates up at certain days, but this is one of the few dissapointments I had on our trip. I really wanted to get some good up-close shots of some of these venues..

The Blue Cube, Beijing-

Jinx

Today we headed up to Okutama to explore the many side roads and we ended up on this extremely steep road and followed it for miles until became a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and then we followed that until it was very much in the far end of nowhere. As we were backtracking on the dirt road, I commented on how I preferred off roading in our newer super-compact car as opposed to my wifeys old super-compact car that has been part of many off road adventures in austere parts of Turkey. I would call it a beater, but I don’t want to jinx myself again.

As soon as we hit pavement, we parked the car so I could take the photograph below. Not the most interesting photograph, but it has an interesting story. See, as soon as I went back to the car and tried to start it up, I heard a of-all-the-places-we-could-suddenly-have-mechanical-problems type of sound aka the starter sounded like it was dead and we have an automatic with power brakes. No jump starting or coasting down to the main road, plus we don’t speak Japanese, on top of all that.. the road was so steep in places that a tow truck would probably never attempt going out there.

I decided rolling the car off the hillside wasn’t a good long-term solution and we packed up our camera gear and started the trek to the town of Okutama for some help. Luckily we quickly stumbled on 3 locals foraging for leaves to be used in their favorite tempura recipe and we were able to play charades to see if we could get some help. We went back to the car and when they heard the starter, they immediately knew that only the battery was dead and it could be jumped. They were right and that was the biggest relief I have had in a long time!

Thank you 3 guys foraging for leaves to use for a tasty tempura meal! I dedicate this picture–that would have been a lot better had I tried to piece together a vertorama to capture the beautiful overlook–to you guys!

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Here is another one from Showa Park. I am sure the trees in the background are completely full of green leaves now. The day after the cherry blossoms all fell off, the green leaves started appearing on the trees all over the surrounding areas.

This is a blend of a DRI on top of an HDR using 5 exposures for both. I used the +1 exposure underneath it all to paint in the people since the DRI and HDR show lots of ghosts due to the the movements of the people. I topped it all of with a lush icing of LuciArt. That program is far and away my favorite way to add sharpening to images.

Warpzone

Lightroom amazes me the more I play around with it. I had another picture on of the many oddities to be found within Showa Kinen Park, but the neat spiral walkway was surrounded by unsightly, yellowish grass. I played around with the pretty much every option including about 8 gradient filters and ended up with this. The only thing I used Photoshop for was to run an unsharp mask on it since the Lightroom sharpening doesn’t appear to do as good a job at that.