Friday 31 August 2012

DNS Report In!

I just tried to access this site via the url http://www.eastern-escapology.blogspot.com and it came up with something else entirely.  Either the DNS has been poisoned, leading to an entirely different site, or they changed the URL and I have no idea about it.  Basically, access this site via google using any search you want, rather than via the URL bar.

Anyway, here are some more pictures.


So all these pictures have been digitally retouched.  Interestingly, a few of them have mistakes that I can't be bothered to rectify.  Don't worry, I'll point them out anyway.  This one is one of my favourites - as such it's received a few different treatments to see what you can get away with.


Black and white helps a lot with some pictures, but it often detracts from the more mundane ones.  For this one I'm not sure why, but it looks better in black and white.  A photographic theorist will surely know the answer as to why; but an academic I am not.


This one has the slider for 'vivid,' cranked up.  The sky is boring, the shapes not well framed, but I liked it because it's fairly representative of what you come across in Japan.


This is another one of my favourites.  I was struggling to take (what I consider to be) an interesting picture of the cranes.  They were often in isolation, and it was difficult to bring the colours out from the background.  The strings of origami were often bereft of identity, so having the chinese characters in the background helped with placing them.


This is one of my b/w versions of the above picture.  I turned the red to maximum and picked out the flame.  The reflection was the hardest part to select because the tool kept doing an MS paint and selecting everything.


B/w is key for this picture.  I really like it, despite it being too busy for it to be considered 'good,' by most people.  The desaturation (is it desaturation to take away colour?  Who knows) takes away some of the complexity, while the straight line running through the centre of the picture is broken by the kid and her dad, and the people in the rickshaw.  There's a lot going on, and I find it appealing.


Often, pictures of homelessness are shown in colour to pick out the drabness of their situation, highlighting the difficulties of their plight.  B/w does romanticise the whole situation which is unfortunate, but at the same time you have the opportunity to look past the clutter and focus on the person - should you choose to do so.


These insects were everywhere.  It took a lot of stretching, pulling and coercing to get the picture like this; you can tell by the imperfections in the image.  Still, the whole thing has a pleasing simplicity that I enjoy, while the colours really stand out against the post.


So this was taken in the hotel where Kurosawa stayed while in Kyoto.  The paper had the most fantastic texture, but once again I had to torture the image in order to bring that out.  I didn't take the best initial photograph to do so, thus ending up with this grainy picture.  It's worth noting that all these are jpg's due to the limitations of the blog website.


The final picture.  If you look at the bottom right of the flame, I accidentally overlapped the green effect causing it to overtake some of the silver of the metal.  This mistake is pretty elementary and reasonably easily rectified (praise allah for layers!) but I can't be doing with it.  I spent long enough looking at these pictures that I don't want to go back anytime soon.

And that's that for these edited pictures.  I'll put more holiday snaps up in the future (there are plenty).

Ciao.

Sunday 26 August 2012

Damnit

So school doesn't start for another couple of days, but guess where I am.  Unfortunately my criminal ineptitude means that not only could I have stayed at the festival (photographs incoming) for a lot longer, I could have properly thanked those who helped me out over the weekend.  It was excellent.  On the Saturday we had a Lion training session in Summer heat that shouldn't be legal - then a superb barbecue hosted by a fellow Englishman on his penthouse terrace (whom I'm asking for a job, which is a shame because his abode is something to aspire to and I don't want to seem like a kissass).

The training session consisted of me trying my best to stay in the shade; on a rugby pitch.  As you may imagine that didn't work out well.  Nor did the sun-cream that kept removing itself due to my incessant sweating.  I ended up being burned in more ways than one, because the fitness session we had at the end caught me off guard.  It was (what seemed like) an incredibly simple concept, do ten sprints over 50 (or so) metres, broken up by a minute or so rest.  Each set of sprints was conducted in pairs, so we left the line five times.  The execution was quite fun - a race between two teams to pick up cones scattered around the pitch and then feed them onto a pole placed on the halfway line.  Getting the cone and placing it onto the pole was the first sprint, with a few seconds rest while you're threading a surprisingly difficult needle, then sprint back to your team.  I didn't know when we started, but the losing team had to buy drinks (non-alcoholic) for the winners.

It caught me off guard because I was trying my hardest.  On the final sprint I ended up just flopping over the line and collapsing in a giant heap.  Afterwards, as cliche as it might sound, my legs were jelly.  They barely responded to commands and whether it was the heat or the exertion, I felt awful.  It took about twenty minutes for my body to behave normally again, which is a long time to remind yourself of the old american frontier literature, where they take glee in pointing out to the reader that overworked horses are sent to the knackers.

One of my friends was performing at a concert on the same day.  Unfortunately he was playing at a place that cost forty quid to enter, on the other side of Tokyo, at the same time as my training finished.  To cap off the impossibility of going to see him, all the tickets were booked so I couldn't get in anyway.  It's a shame because I'm not normally interested in music and events like that, except when a friend or acquaintance is involved.  He's the guy I went swimming with a year ago, whose shorts were far too small.  I was thinking about buying a cheap pair of kids shorts to give to him.

So I ended up wiling away the interminable hours at a barbecue, forcing myself to eat sausages and burgers provided by a fellow Englishman who goes by the name of Liam.  The burgers were particularly good as they were chunky things - none of this macdonalds style american nonsense.  The sausages weren't so good as they were the american style nonsense; but they were edible.  I'm thinking about having a spare key secretly made, so I can sneak onto his patio and chill out without the need for a pesky invitation.

Unfortunately I lost track of time (something I do with alarming frequency) and missed my last train home.  I therefore had to stay around the team captains house (again) so I could play in the small 9's tournament being held at the gaijin home ground.

It was a lot of fun, but somehow hotter than the Saturday which meant a lot of hiding under the various tents people had erected.

Our club were banned from our own competition by the council (the long arm of local politics reaches far in Japan) because one of our players threw their boots away in the wrong rubbish bin a month or so earlier (evidently boots are not combustible) necessitating a divide within our team.  A few of the Japanese players went to a team in blue.  A few of the foreigners went to a different blue team, and the rest of us went to a team that goes by the name 'dandelion.'  With this stoically branded team, we would embark on a six (or so) game campaign to win the title.  It's worth mentioning that me and Bati (a Fijian guy who is over forty) initially went to the light blue team and were rejected, turned away like the fat kids in school.  This was to fuel for us to burn while playing.

The games went by surprisingly quickly, with the green team consisting mainly of foreigners (for some reason they'd turned up to this tournament with few players, most of whom weren't even willing to participate) and spoonfuls of luck.  We won every game of the league stage, meaning we went into the knockout competition for the top prize.  The matches were seven minutes long (there were ten teams, so a lot of matches which was the reason for the short games) with no turnaround at half time.  The scrum situation was bizarre, with the attacking team picking however many players they wanted, the defending team being obliged to match that number.  Any fewer than five people became an uncontested scrum so everyone opted for four men each time.  It was quite strange.  There was an eight man scrum at one point, which meant there were no players in the back line.

It was exceedingly hot, but a lot of fun.  It wasn't particularly serious so it made a nice change from the other competitions I play in, and there was a great atmosphere among the foreigners, even though we split up into different teams.  We didn't end up playing the light blues (a crying shame, in my opinion) but we did play the dark blues in the final.  A couple of our Japanese players were playing for them, and were dominant in their previous games.  We were expecting a tough game, which they delivered due to a late fightback after we went a couple ahead.  Bati, a veteran in sporting terms, has this incredible ability to turn on his Fiji within the short format game.  It's often said that Fijians go through spaces no one else could, but it's not true.  I watched him actively make space, where none existed before.  He's not the fastest guy, but he has a psychic ability to split defence despite there being more than enough people to cover him. In the final he took a defensive line of five people, and walked between two of them to score.  When he got the ball, one of the defenders was actually standing right in front of him, but Bati mesmerised him, telepathically forcing the opposition player to move out of his way without so much as a touch.

Mojee, another Fijian, is much more direct.  At four foot nothing and a hundred or so kg's, he essentially makes like a temple of doom boulder and bowls people out of the way.  A pretty effective combination.

Anyway, after the tournament I was escorted to a local public bath by an american who has studied Japanese for a long time, and who has lived here long enough to know all the customs and traditions.  It's not the first time I've been to one, but it is the first time I've been so filthy when going in so he imparted practical knowledge unto me, for which I am grateful.  The first thing you do is clean off, showering away the grime so that you can enter the hot baths to chill out.  Unfortunately I never got past the cleaning off the grime part as I couldn't get the dust out of my grazes.  I spent a fair while rubbing down the cuts and scrapes, quietly cursing the fact I eschewed taping in favour of vaseline.  I also have some nice blisters on my feet - nice enough to take a couple of photos tonight I think.

After that we went to a massive festival - the biggest one I've ever been to by a long stretch.  I'll write about it at a later date, but for now, that's all you're getting!

#EDIT#  The other pictures are now annotated.

Thursday 23 August 2012

More, We Need More!

So I'm sitting here, 2 more days left of my holiday.  Things that might occupy my time today include; doing uni work, running or going to the gym, writing letters, reading one of the trash chick-lit books mum left behind or concocting another blog post.  Of those things, it's self-evident which I chose and as a result, hope you come to learn a little of the laconic malaise with which I prefer to spend my time off.  Why work hard in these short few days?  I'm only going to have to head to the money making institution come Monday.


So we start this edition with photos of a couple of my friends eating ice.  Quite literally ice.  I don't know why they do it, I've got to assume it's an american thing.


It took a good long while for them to get used to having a great big camera shoved in their face, but I got a few good pictures of them - something for them to look back on.  Again, none of these are colour corrected (because I'm too lazy).


The girl on the left is the opera singer from a couple of years ago.  Still got an amazing voice - still not seen her live.  I'll get round to it one day, when I have lots of money and lots of free time...  Probably not soon then.


And the last one, because I like it.


I don't know what kind of insect this is, but there were a few emerging from their pupae stage.


Late night photography is tricky without a tripod.  It often leads to unexpected results.  This is the river that `


I quite like the fluid look of photographs taken over a longer period - even if they're not particularly well thought out.


Every city looks the same at night, looking down a long road at a line of taxis.


There are homeless people in Kyoto too.


Pagodas too.  Lots of pagodas in Kyoto.


This is the entrance to Kyumizudera temple, or as I affectionately know it; the temple in the clouds.


These stone guardians are everywhere.  I assume they ward off something evil or bad, but they could just be effigies of past owners pets.


I don't think I had the correct lens setup to portray what you could see through this gate, because the view through to the rest of the city was quite special.  You'll just have to take my word for it.


Unfortunately an awful lot of the temples and religious structures were under repair.  The kind of repair that lasts until 2020, and encompasses the entire structure.  It wasn't just at kiyomizudera, it was all over Tokyo and Kyoto.  I wondered whether the Tokyo renovations were due to the earthquake, but I don't think Kyoto was particularly affected so I'm not sure whether there was a different reason.  Maybe an injection of funding from the government?  Implausible, I'll admit.


So here's something I've learned the hard way.  A very large number of your photographs rely on horizontal lines being exactly level.  If they're not, you end up with the above.  It looks like the titanic just after it struck the iceberg, replete with worried passenger.


I don't know why they like terrapins so much, but they're everywhere.  Also, try telling a Japanese person that English people call freshwater tortoises terrapins and not tortoises/turtles. It elicits some interesting attempts at pronunciation.


Once you've gone through the main temple, you walk around a short covered path that looks back on it.  In my opinion, this is where the best views are to be had.  You can see the fantastic work that went into creating the structure.


The city is in the background, with the bowl of mountains encompassing it.


These are looking back at the pagoda, which is a less photographed part of the grounds.  If you've ever seen a photograph of a Japanese temple, there are good odds that you've seen the silver pavillion, golden pavillion, or this place.  It might or might not be particularly important within the realms of religion in Japan, but it is a fantastic sight.


For that reason I tried to shoot something that's a bit different.  Obviously there are a billion pictures of this too, but you work with what you've got.


The main structure is supported on these beams, extending upwards ten or so metres.  It's very large so I'd imagine there's a fair amount of stress on these uprights.  I wonder how they replace them?


These are paper cranes.  Origami is obviously popular in Japan, but the cranes are symbolic of peace.  A girl tried to fold a thousand after the Hiroshima bombings, believing they would save her life (she was burned and suffering from radiation poisoning).  Unfortunately she died before finishing, so her classmates folded the thousand and hung them up in Hiroshima.  After that, they came to act as a reminder that war is bad - and don't piss of the yanks.

These ones have obviously been hanging up for a while, fading in the sun.  You're free to form your own opinions of what this is symbolic of.


Lyn doing some martial arts.  In my head, Kung fu fighting is looping continuously.


Kyoto tower is essentially a baby version of Tokyo tower, which is now a baby version of the new skytree.


Kyoto tower, once more.


I think sushi is a taste you come to like more and more, because I'm starting to enjoy it as a foodstuff, rather than simply a novelty, as I did before.


This drunk chinese guy was attracted to Lyn, and our stuff in the fridge.  I tried to get mum to leave him and Lyn alone for some quiet talking time, but her sense of camaraderie beat out my devious plan.


I think this is back to Tokyo now, but I'm not sure.  While the temples have distinguishing features that make them all unique, the eaves aren't one of them.


All artsy fartsy like.


So we went to learn about a tea ceremony.  I knew some of the stuff, how to present and be presented with a bowl for example, but I learned tons about old Japanese customs.  In much the same way as European high society developed a complicated 'language,' with fans, Japan used them to communicate with their hosts or guests.


A particular highlight for me was a trip to the hotel that Akira Kurosawa stayed at, while filming some of his epics.  He wrote a lot there too.  He was the director I compared to Shakespeare (he based several movies on Shakespearean dramas) during my final year dissertation.  I'd walked past the place a few times (it's in Kyoto) but never realised this is where he stayed.  It was only on the off-chance that I noticed something written in the kimono shop, leading to the owner (Takako's mum) explaining that it was from the hotel across the street.  A marvelous coincidence.


This is a lamp from the hotel, touched up to bring out the details in the paper.


He had a specific room, looking over this courtyard, where he used to write.  The woman who owns the building talked about him and how they'd talk about films, music and anything else that had taken his fancy.


And this is us outside the entrance.


After I dropped mum and Lyn off at the hostel, we went out for a couple of drinks.  As I was still recovering from my knee/hand op at this point, I wasn't afraid to have a few.

This container was actually only a litre.  I didn't have the heart to tell them that in Germany, this is a standard size for one glass - and in England people would think nothing of ordering a few of these for themselves.  It was worth leaving them in the dark for the reaction though.


So I wore rugby stuff for the entire holiday.  My theory was that rugby clothes are meant to be sweated in, which is something I did with aplomb.  The shirts are also comfortable which helps.  Free advertising for Lion.  (Buy their shampoo!)


This was a wedding shoot in Nara, south (I think) of Kyoto.  When you look at the screen on a digital camera it's called chimping, and the way this guy is walking makes him look like a monkey, so it's a perfect combination.


It was a thousand degrees and the photographer is wearing a hoodie with trousers, and the couple are wearing kimono.  Incredible.


I sometimes wonder why they need to meter the light when it's that bright, but I guess the shade from the umbrella changes everything up.


Last one from the wedding shoot.  Physical contact.  Risque.


Look carefully at the sign behind these guys.


How they didn't make it onto TV I'll never know.  Wasted talent.


Nara is famous for deer, of which there are many.


And temples.  There are an awful lot of those too.


This old bastard was spitting, making the most horrific noises that I've heard come from a human being since I watched Psycho.  Anyway, I accidentally took quite a good picture of him.  Damnit.


These chinese girls kept harassing the poor deer, but their picture taking made for some interesting pictures of my own.  Very meta.


I threw some change into this guys bowl.  After doing so, realised that I'd woefully underpaid him so I took a quick snap and ran.


This is pikachu eating Lyn.


Kyoto station is massive in every sense of the word.


We went to an umbrella shop, a very high-class establishment that had little for under a hundred quid.  Needless to say, I was on tenterhooks every time they picked one up.


I can't remember which one Lyn got in the end, but they were all magnificent.


This is the festival for a town near me.  After Lyn departed, we went into town and happened upon this event.


The same place, with a woman accompanying the drums.


There were a surprising number of children.  Considering the much bemoaned decline in interest of younger generations in traditional arts, there were a lot of kids playing instruments.


This guy was the best.  He was belting those drums with everything he had.  Extremely energetic considering the heat.


Thumbs up, good music too.  The street had a dozen trucks each carrying music makers, creating an intensely confusing, but extremely vibrant atmosphere.  It was difficult to tell where one song ended and another began, but it was a great piece of Japan.


This was the shrine they were carrying.  We got there quite early so no one was actually running around with it yet.

The last picture is one of sashimi.  I think sushi is raw fish with rice, whereas sashimi is raw fish sans rice.  There's also some chopped up octopus there too (too chewy for me).  Octopus aside, delicious.  The green paste is a strange, hot accoutrement that is delicious.  Any more than a dab and it acts as a decongestant rather than a foodstuff, however.