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.
superb!
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