Almost Christmas!

So I'm fairly sure Christmas was yesterday, and tomorrow will also be Christmas.

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.

Awa odori festival from a few years ago

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've also bought a scanner, and I'm in the process of digitising all my film.  The eventual aim is to get to my Grandads slides and 35mm, and digitise those before they disintegrate.  At the moment I'm doing mine so I can perfect the process.  If I end up faffing about with his slides and film, there's going to be a fair amount of damage done because some of the slides are fragile to an extent that leads me to suspect he used them to cover roof tiles, or patch up glass in his greenhouse.  Either that, or they're quite old.

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.

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!

Before Bed

So I'm off to have a nap now, but before I do I thought I'd share the low quality scans of the pictures I took with my brand new (enormous) film camera.

There is one portrait that came out nicely, but the rest were a bit 'meh.'  They were, in fact, very 'meh,' so here they are for your viewing (dis)pleasure!

Plants are often viewed as being colourful and therefore people think they require colour photographs to do them justice.
Trees on the other hand...

Of course they are black and white, because I have a digital camera for the colour stuff.

That aside, as these are the low quality scans the quality will be comparable to any .jpg created by a low end digital camera, or by scans from 35mm saved as .jpg

The benefit comes when I want to get one of the negatives blown up really big like.

That's not entirely the whole story though - the feel of medium format is slightly different and, for mine, gives a slightly ethereal quality to some of the pictures.  Not all of them of course, but on the occasions when you get it just right, there's a style that you can't replicate elsewhere.

This plant seemed to be rather old and was definitely shapely enough that a decent picture should have come out of it; I just couldn't find the angle this time.

Exactly one picture in this series has something approaching that feeling.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which one you think it is.  It might well be wishful thinking on my part, and you might decide none of them have 'it.'

The water is so featureless - it'd be an alright picture if there was a skyscraper reflected in it.

I won't disagree if you think these aren't very inspiring, but look at them as a proof of concept.  I mostly figured out how to use the camera!

There's a title about driftwood or bare branches or something here.

I also learned that hand holding it viable if you have decent light, and even if you don't have tons of light you can still walk away with a picture or two despite the weight of the thing.

Divine Headquarters

I don't usually bother editing .jpg's because for every edit there's bound to be a loss of information in the resulting file and I'm habitually saving over old files by mistake (decades of using computers has taught me to save without thinking, which in this case is inadvisable!).  But in this instance I made an exception because I wanted to emphasise the rays peaking over the top of the building.

The camera works.  I figured out how to use it.  There's still half a roll left in the camera waiting to be used up somewhere before I throw another roll in.  That contains the rest of this load of pictures (in truth there are only 2 shots left in that enormous monster so I need to pick up some more film) and a couple of test shots I took to check the film still wound after I dropped the bloody thing (clumsy bastard).

It took a couple of weeks for the film to come back but it was nice to pick it up.  It's like a Christmas present because you forget you put it in to be processed and a week later it's there to be picked up!

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.

Another Night in the Snow

I very much have a favourite among these pictures, but I would be interested to know which of them you find most appealing.  I can't really put my finger on why I like this particular one the most, but it certainly jumps out at me as being the best - there's simply no competition!  These are in no particular order (beyond that determined by blogger) so I hope the sequence doesn't prejudice the results.

So there was another snow event in the Tokyo area (snow event as in weather event, as is all the rage to say nowadays).  I was originally going to wait until the next day to take these pictures, but it started raining around 11PM and showed no signs of letting up.  This would have meant losing the snow, but it also gave a unique opportunity because wet snow has several interesting properties.  One such property is the magnificent roundness everything seems to possess when it gets wet.  I can't really explain this phenomenon, but upon seeing the pictures it was obvious that the flowing curves were missing from my previous set of pictures.  Again, I can't really explain it, but I think you'll see what I mean when you compare these ones to last weeks video.
The rain also had another side effect; that of making the snow exceptionally difficult to navigate.  It became increasingly arduous to maintain balance while walking because the snow wasn't solidifying underfoot.  It became a layer of snow on top of a layer of ice, and even when the ground underneath wasn't frozen over, the snow itself would turn to mush and give way far too easily.  It wasn't as idyllic to walk through as the pictures make it appear.

Having said that, the snow looks particularly snowy because of the rain, so I'm not complaining too much.  When you have buckets of snow it can sometimes look fake.  It tends to look like a blanket, in that the effect is of someone throwing a textured duvet over a surface and being done with it.  The rain really changes the texture into something far more snowy (to look at, at least).


It's absolutely fine to think I'm mad for walking around in the snow until 4AM (truth be told, my battery ran out at 2.30 but I got lost) just to take a few pictures.  I probably am.  Oh well.

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.