Broken Nose Woes

So I recently broke my nose again.  It was on the left hand side, but now it's on the right.

NBD  (no big deal)

Stuff like this happens all the time, it can't be helped.  It does mean that I can't breathe out of the right hand nostril now, which is a bummer because I was fine on both sides before.

Oh well.  Life moves on.

So, just out of idle curiosity (and because we needed a new mosquito door thing) me and the girlfriend went to the local DIY store.  It happened to have a fish place, so we went and had a look around.  It turns out that they have the world most unimpressed fish for sale.  No, really, blow this picture up to full size and tell me that guy isn't just eyeing everyone and everything with contempt.

Ugh, they went with blue, really?

 On the way to the fish store we came across this.  In case you can't tell, this is a giant net covering someones back garden.  The purpose of this monstrosity?  To keep golf balls at bay.  Yes, someone has made a golf cage on the back of their house.  What in the world?

I can't imagine any of the neighbours are too happy.  Then again, if you have this kind of disposable income you're probably leader of their home owners association or something.

Fooooouuuuuuur!  ty thousand dollars worth of cage?

We also saw this cool little butterfly.  It was surprisingly cold that day so I managed to get up nice and close before it flittered away.  Not the most colourful, but it's nice nonetheless.

We bought a bread maker a while ago.  It was that, or a deep fat fryer.  A tough choice I'm sure you'll agree, but the bread won out on daily usage levels.  Normally it makes fantastic bread, but sometimes I'm left in charge of making it, and then this happens.

When someone else is in charge it can make some fantastic white bread, and some amazing raisin bread.

The melonpocalypse from last year has been shelved, and now I'm trying to grow some strawberries.  We had a small crop of beans in the growbags but the yields were disappointing.  The wind up here really messed everything up.

The strawberries were grown from seed, which is uncommon, apprently.  They've yet to fruit, they may yet decide not to, but if they do I'm interested in seeing what kind of size and taste we get out of them.  I wonder if they're like apples in that you never know what the taste of a new plant will be like unless you graft.  The random genetic lottery may not be kind to the tastebuds.  Only time will tell.

And that's it for this little update.  It's been a month since I wrote anything, so I just wanted to drop a few pics down and let the internet at large know that I'm still alive.

Bye for now!

Vietnamore

 So I've decided to spread out the distribution of pictures from Vietnam.

Instead of dropping a ton at once, I'll drip feed them over the space of a few blog posts.

As we were walking around Hoi An (I think) there were tons of people taking wedding pictures, either on the river or next to the colourful lanterns.  This couple were sitting on a boat next to a famous bridge, away from all the tourists.  I waited until the lighting man (each photography group was three strong, camera dude, light dude, boat dude) lit them up, then snapped a few while they were busy doing whatever with their lanterns.

This last one was shot miles away, it's slightly cropped, slightly dark, slightly imperfect, but I like it anyway.  You really need to blow it up to fullscreen, otherwise you can barely see anything other than a red blob.  Regardless it's got an interesting feel to it.

That's it for now!

Black and or White

So I got the film back from a few weeks ago.

The same caveats as before apply - these are all low quality scans and I haven't touched them in any way.

Here's what turned up on my doorstep this evening:

This is the b/w version of the picture that featured on this blog a couple of weeks ago.  The colour version is also my current mobile phone background.

I love the look of wood in b/w, but this needs more contrast.  In fact, none of these pictures are contrasty enough.  (Something I would edit on the computer if I had access to high quality scans).

This is the floor.  It is a picture.

This looks like arteries or something.  I don't know.

Needs about 50% more contrast.  It's one of the tea houses overlooking the lake in hamarikyu onshi koen.  The whole place is pretty interesting to visit, even if there's not much colour.

These kinds of things are best taken in black and white.  The detail of the crumbly bits stands out so much more when you're not forced to process the colour as well.  This was taken at the end of the day, so the shadows are long and interesting.

Rikugien

It's Autumn time.  That means the leaves are changing colour and there's a chance you might snap a few reds among the greens.

Before I move onto the pictures; IBM played against Hino this weekend.  We lost, but I scored our only try and made any number of tackles.  I missed one, and in the process broke the vice captains nose.  Not exactly ideal, but we look past the mistake and try to improve.

The try was an absolute beast of a solo effort by the way.  Amazing.  I'm not allowed to upload it for the whole world to see, but it's great.  Honestly!

Anyway, onto the pictures.

As you can see, I took a lot of pictures of the same place.  Apart from the lack of colour elsewhere (it's still a little early for the true Autumn show) this place had a nice combination of light falling through the trees and shades of orange and red.

This one is slightly more contrasty making the reds a little redder.  As a result I think I prefer this one.

This one also looks quite good in black and white, but everyone's had enough of that.  I might go back and deepen the reds a little.

This is the view from the bridge above.

Aha surprise!  Black and white!  I over compensated for the lens I was using, hence why this pillar bends in really awkward ways from the middle third upwards.  It's easy enough to correct if I ever want to come back to this picture; for now it's fine.

This is the view looking back towards the entrance of the place.  It's supposed to look like this all the way around the park at this time of year, but this is the only really pretty stretch at the moment.  I'm sure it'll look good in a couple of weeks, maybe less.  I'm not sure how long it takes for the whole place to change before the leaves start dropping.  If it's like England, you'll only have a relatively short period of time before everything looks drab.

Nagasaki

So I'd vowed to check out both Nagasaki and Hiroshima during my stay in Japan.  This Summer I managed to finish my pilgrimage - heading to Nagasaki by train.

It's a long, long way from Tokyo to Nagasaki.  It took the best part of 9 hours on bullet and express trains meaning it's probably in the order of a thousand kilometres between the two cities.  Japan may only have the inhabitable land space of the U.K. but it's almost as long as america is tall.

I took a fair number of pictures during the trip, but truth be told very few were up to scratch.  Whenever I go outside with my camera I set myself some challenges; this time it was to take as few pictures as possible, to try and get a 'keeper,' on the first attempt at each subject.  I didn't always stick to this plan, but it turned out to be quite thought provoking.  For the first time ever I have an album where each picture tends to be entirely different from the last and this is something of a novelty for me.  As always, it was my intention to walk away from a days shoot with one single picture that, when looked at in 60 years time, will remind me of the day and fill me with pride at having taken it.  It's always been my intention to have enough quality pictures to one day fill a book, and taking the slow and steady approach is about the only way I can think of achieving this goal.

You can judge whether I've succeeded in that aim.

I'll start off with the tackiest picture imaginable.  Aside from the scene in Schindlers list that has become infamous, black and white with a single source of colour rarely affects people in the way the creator intends.  Maybe they've become so common that no one cares anymore.  Maybe, like the tilted angle photograph of the 90's, it's a fashion that was never going to live beyond the inaugural years of photoshop.

So this was an interesting picture to edit.  At first I darkened both the sky and the trees somewhat - the intention was to highlight the woman (due to the angle of the picture, mostly ignoring the child she is carrying) at the expense of everything else.  It looked okay, but it lacked any kind of interest beyond the statue.  The sky was interesting enough (see: had clouds) that I felt the light (sky)/dark (trees)/light (statue) scheme worked to the point of acceptability.  Making her stand out without distorting the entire picture was the challenge, and I don't really know if I've succeeded in that endeavour.

With a portrait format the focus shifts away from encompassing the setting to settle on the figure.  I found the woman a much more interesting subject (literally everyone else was taking pictures of the child with the woman as an incidental point of focus) than the child.  It is her saving the child, but it is her generation, her peers that caused the child suffering in the first place.

At this point it is worth pointing out that the artist intended the woman to represent some kind of peaceful deity.  Knowing god and or gods are a lie, I see her as the embodiment of peaceful thoughts or actions within humanity.  She is not a child, so doesn't hold the innocence of the child and as such, is as culpable as the rest of us for the actions of our equals.  The somber look on her face isn't so much sadness at the loss of that child, or the actions of that time - it's the inescapable truth that humanity is destined to continue doing this over and over again.

As such, I find her expression much more revealing than the body of the child is saddening.

This is the last pillar standing at the church in Nagasaki.  Much like the dome in Hiroshima it stands as a monument to the devastation of war and much like the dome in Hiroshima, it stands as a symbol of hope.

This guy is symbolic of peace versus war.  One of his arms represents war, the other peace.  When I heard which was which, I couldn't reconcile the idea of why each one was as it was, so I could never commit to memory which arm symbolised what.

This is probably my favourite picture.  You could absolutely miss the pidgeon sitting on her arm, but the expression in the statue alone makes it worthwhile.  Much like the ruminations about the woman above, I couldn't decide how to edit this picture in post.  In the end I went much the same route, but this time trying to get the viewer to look at her face as much as possible before looking at the other details in the picture.

To be honest I don't think any of these are worthy of more than a couple of seconds of perusal but you never know.  Everyone has different tastes after all.

I'll hopefully be adding a number of blog posts in the coming days with (fingers crossed) a lot of pictures to accompany.

If you haven't already seen the videos of the festival and my thirty second montage of Japan this Summer, check out the posts prior to this one.

IBM vs Secom

Secom are a team in our league.  IBM beat them last year, making them the only victory of the season.

As this year has started with a couple of positive results, we could have been expected to go on and further improve despite the four days of solid, heavy rain prior to the occasion.  Amazingly enough, it wasn't particularly wet underfoot (the field must have immense drainage) and there was no rain in the air - so it ended up being fairly dry.

Unfortunately, a week ago during the game against Fuji Xerox (which we won by forty or fifty) I'd pulled my left hamstring scoring my second try of the day.  I was only on for fifteen minutes.  In that time I made 1 tackle (still 100% for the season) and effected one turnover along with the two scores.

Needless to say I was disappointed not to be playing today - a game in which we won by only two points.  Seemingly neither team could catch a ball, and we were constantly pushed off the ruck meaning we lost momentum all over the place.  Having said that, we won, which considering the backwards and forwards nature of the game is impressive.

Anyway, that aside, I took a few pictures.  

I'm particularly tired today because I hit the gym hard afterwards, so the colour balancing on a lot of these is somewhere between wrong, and completely wacko.  Try not to think about it too much.

Ibaraki Temple

So this first one is my attempt at something called 'instagram.' It comes from the effect of taking pictures with crappy cameras in order to get a certain look - often aged or faded. The old cameras people tend to use are lomo (I think they are\were manufactured in Hong Kong) and one of the types of this crappy looking photography is lomography; I might have mentioned it before.

Anyway, this type of photography has its place in the world, as do all the other types. The problem is that people tend to think that this kind of massively washed out look has now replaced the idea of taking a good picture. Instead, you take any old garbage and then put filters (the computational kind) on top (hence instagram, the phone application). This is my attempt at recreating that look without using any nonsense.

All the pictures are directly out of the camera, converted to very low quality .jpg in order to speed the process of putting them on the net. I'll go back and modify them properly at some point.

The next two are my attempt at trying to capture the sunset. The colours are, frankly, wrong. However, I haven't gone back and modified the pictures in any way, so when I do, that'll be the first thing I change. Then again, I see my pictures on a lot of different monitors and they all look different colour wise, so maybe I should just leave them be. I have no way of knowing what a black or red or any other colour will look like once it's been printed. In most countries I think the cheapest way to find out would be to get a monitor calibrator. Here I think the cheapest way would be to take a few test shots down to the printers after a few test shots and simply have them printed out.



The young lady was on her way to her coming of age ceremony. I asked her in broken Japanese if it was okay to take a picture because she was wearing a wonderful kimono. I've seen a few black ones around lately (ones with a base colour of black because they're never all one colour) and it seems to be the latest fashion. If you're spending 5,000 USD on one of these, I would be surprised if anyone would try to keep up with fashions, but they do apparently.

Chest Bump

So I played for Lion this weekend.

I started for only the second time this season, and I managed to snag a try by being in the right place at the right time when one of us put a kick through that bounced horribly for the other team.

I also bruised my windpipe, by letting someone hit me in the chest. The result is that I have a tiny amount of blood present every time I cough, meaning that my mouth constantly tastes like blood. Which is gross. I didn't carry on because coughing up blood is as scary as hell, and because my chest, and by extension shoulders, neck and back, were bloody sore. I went to the hospital and had an x-ray, despite knowing it was pointless and was promptly sent home. I'm still coughing a tiny amount of blood so I'll go back to the hospital and tell them to cauterise it or something.

Now for the defence: I had to tackle him in a moronic position because there was a 2 on 1 overlap and without me making like a scarecrow, he would have just passed out of the tackle and they would have scored. So there. Anyway, that aside, I have some more pictures from climbing last week, and a couple from the game this week.

The guy behind (his name is Yuu) has got the best expression I think I've ever seen in a picture.  Look at that smile!

This is me prepping for one of the pictures further down the post.

This is me trying to smile while weighing a lot.

This is me failing to smile for long enough.

This is, without a doubt, the best picture of me that I have ever seen.  I'm trying to smile while holding onto the wall with one hand - and it just isn't working.  I smile every time I see this!

This is the obligatory end of season team picture.  I'm bloody cold at this point so have my tracksuit and hat on.  We won all our games this season so we're going to play in a promotion match in two weeks, against Japan Airlines.

And this is just another shot of me getting up to the protrusion for the photo.