So Apparently, I Didn't Go Snowboarding

I'm pretty sure I have a load of snowboarding pictures somewhere, I just can't seem to find them.  They must be at home somewhere, sitting in a back corner of the now full two terabyte drive I've filled up with pictures.  The problem is that I'm too spineless to delete anything - I always say I'll go back and look them through, deleting the stinkers (but I never do).  I'll get round to it one day.

The other problem is that the workflow with .craw (canon raw files?  I don't know what their extension is) is horrendous.  I have to take the .raw (30 megs per picture) convert it into a digital negative (.dng I think?) which is some number of megabytes big (another 30 or so, most likely) and then convert them all to low quality jpg's so I can view them with a standard picture viewer (I haven't found a standard picture viewing replacement that supports .dng).  It's all a bit of a faff, and requires voluminous disks the likes of which are too expensive for me to purchase at this time.  The result is an incredible lack of space that's forcing me to delete things; that being something with which I've never had much truck.

So, here I am with no snowboarding pictures to show you at the moment, but rest assured that they're out there, somewhere in the vast wilderness that comprises the digital landscape of my computer.  I'll get them up, sooner or later.  In the meantime, here are some other I took.

This guy was painting dragons in the style that is traditional to the area, a highly stylised asian dragon (think long, thin, living in the sky rather than breathing fire and sleeping on gold).  They were relatively cheap, and absolutely perfect for framing and hanging.

This fountain represents the dragon pretty well.  This photo neglects the serpentine body in favour of highlighting the absolutely evil eyes.

This is a close-up of some gold-leaf panel work.  I gave it the black and white treatment in order to focus attention on the detail of the work, and the roughness of the top.

This was a homeless guy we found in exactly the same place on two separate days, weeks apart.  I'm not entirely sure he was alive but I was convinced by my companions that he was.

For some reason a lot of Japanese people like this picture.  Wabi sabi!

This is a wide-angle view of the artist as he wrote on the dragon picture.  I can't remember what he's writing, but it's probably of artistic merit.

This is absolutely one of my favourite pictures ever.  The second I took it I said 'I will like this picture when it comes out,' which isn't something I've ever said before.  Perhaps I like it because I said I would, in which case I should say it more often.  Perhaps I like it because it contains fire and I'm secretly a pyromaniac.

And this is one that contains snow.  Probably more to come next time.