I say this because it's been more than a month and a half since the holidays and yet it feels like minutes have passed.
As a quick recap of the year so far, I was surprisingly ill for a long time, even by my own lofty illness gathering standards. This spiralled into a few hospital visits where I was brushed off (booooo Japanese healthcare!) towards finding a clinic that I actually think might be halfway decent. The doctor seemed to care which was nice, and I have hope that I might actually be able to find pain medication now that I'm not simply laughed out of the facility. Things are looking up!
Now that I've finished with rugby, I've started playing badminton and occasionally fishing. I've only lost about 7gbp's worth of gear on the three separate occasions fishing has been attempted, which is pretty good in my books. I've yet to catch anything but rocks, so I'm looking forward to working through shoes, boots and eventually towards shopping trolleys. At some point next year I expect to get a nibble, then towards the end of this decade I expect a fish might bite. At my current pace, this is actually the cheapest hobby I've ever partaken in.
I am terrible at badminton. I cannot play doubles to save my life. It doesn't help that there's a language barrier (in most other situations a half second pause to consider what to say is acceptable, in a game as fast as badminton that is less acceptable). What I have found is that I am pretty damned competitive against any of my opponents (they're all either 80, or heavily pregnant) if I just play by myself and ignore my partner. This is of course bad form, so I only do it when I've stuffed up a dozen previous shots and feel like I need to make amends - or once an hour, whichever comes first. I am not a team player.
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| Awa odori festival from a few years ago |
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| A tall building in London, it might be famous or something. I don't think many people know about it though. Weird that the tour bus would even drive past it. |
I still haven't dialed in the settings for the scanner properly, but I'm getting there. I'm probably a thousand pictures in at this point so the act of physically loading the pictures is easy enough, but I'm not quite sure of the settings I want to use. You can scan the pictures to ridiculous sizes with zero increase in quality, to the point where a single picture runs towards 2 gigs. This is plainly ridiculous, although there are one or two pictures that I really like, that have had this treatment.
I will write a blog post about the process required to ensure as little dust gets into the final picture as possible though, because it is unbelievable how much crap comes through to the end product.
My main monitor isn't colour balanced which is also another problem, because the pictures look completely different on both my monitors, and then when viewed on a phone look completely different again. It's a tricky situation, so I'm trying to save the pictures with the highest quality, with the most neutral colour balance possible. This leaves a lot of otherwise good pictures looking quite bland until they are edited.
I've also recieved half a dozen lenses from very old cameras (they still use screw thread mounts, that's how old they are) from a friend, so am in the process of finding adapters for those. There's a totally radical (dude) 180 degree fisheye that I desperately want to try out, and a crazy 600mm telephoto. I have no idea of the quality, but they were going in the bin until they found a home here.
Now I've written that, back to studying Japanese.
quite a few people know about that building, by the way - it's St. Paul's cathedral
ReplyDeleteWhy you stop playing rugby?
ReplyDelete