The Votes Are In

So I went to a Summer festival a month ago, and managed to take a few pictures with a 35mm camera.  As you might expect there were duffers, but I think a fair number turned out alright.  Tell me what you think.

Don't ask what that powder is.

Of course it's been long established that no one likes black and white photographs, but I can't stop myself.  I really like them!

If these pictures were in colour you'd notice the kids drab clothes, but they're not so you don't.  These guys wouldn't stop staring at me (it was a really rural festival so I doubt they've seen many whiteys) so I decided to take a picture.  Unfortunately their mum made them do the 2 finger peace thing which is a shame because that universally ruins every photograph ever.

This dude was chillin' because it was rather hot.  I can imagine it being way worse at the top there, not being allowed to come down.

This festival appears to be about drinking a lot of alcohol then pushing bloody great one ton carts around town.  When they need to turn the thing they need to up and drag it around in a circle.  They have wooden wheels and no steering, so you end up with great pictures like this one.

There are tons of lamps around the place even during the day.  I think it's because they look cool.

Each shrine has a procession accompanying it, including the town old boys who chill out and drink at the back.

Each shrine has different patterns and designs, often but not always involving dragons.

This is my favourite photograph from the festival, and one of my favourites ever.  I wish I was as cool as him.

At night they take the shrines to a local town (pushed all the way of course) and spin it on the spot a dozen times.  It's hard work, especially after hefting the damn things around for 2 days.  After spinning they push them all the way back home.

This is one of the carts with nighttime adornments.  That's where all the lamps go when they're not being carried by hand.

On a different note, this is a duck.

This is another one of my all-time favourite photographs ever.  You'll have to guess where it was taken.  Two internet points if you get it right.  It's very orange but after colour correcting it didn't quite look right, so I put it back this way.  For some reason the colour is intrinsic to the feel of the image, kind of nostalgic perhaps?

Anyway, I went to another festival today but didn't have much time to take pictures so I probably didn't get anything worth uploading.  If, by some miracle they're not all blurred messes I'll put them up sometime in a couple of weeks.

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.

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!

A Few More

These ones are a bit of a hodgepodge, but they were all taken within a week of each other.

This is a sculpture set outside the imperial palace in Tokyo.  The part of the palace that is opened to the public during specific holidays (toff birthdays and whatnot) is exceptionally boring.  It's the most dull plaza I've ever seen, quite deliberately so by the looks of things.  Sometimes designers completely misunderstand the space within which they work and you end up with things like the gherkin (something I hate and love depending on any arbitrary measure, such as which way the wind is blowing).  The designers of this place just seem to have given up trying to design anything at all, instead focussing on the gardens hidden behind vast walls and the building itself.

Fuck the plebs.

These lanterns were quite common but difficult to place in their surroundings due to their style.  I can't tell whether these are a Japanese interpretation of a long-past European style, an original Japanese creation or something else entirely.  I feel like they belong in an old German town or something.

Anyway I took a couple of pictures to show both the shape and the colour - both were rather interesting when place within the old grounds of the palace.  Although, to be fair, if you walked into the place without knowing it was a centuries old place it's entirely possible to mistake it for something much newer; and much more European.

The colours in this picture are all messed up.  The pink of the flower is as they were (at least on my non colour controlled screen) but the background green is luminous - decidedly unlike the leaves of the various lilies around Japan.

A man on a horse.  It's either a very important man, or a very important horse.  The outside shot is that it is, in face, a very important hat.

The shape of water is always fascinating when photographed.  I haven't the time or patience to take pictures of droplets, so this will have to do.  Water on a lily (I think it's actually lotus) leaf.

This one was actually taken outside Himeji castle, pictures of which follow.  It had an absolutely magnificent tea house overlooking the castle, along with a fantastic pong replete with waterfalls and enormous fish.  A perfect example of the Japanese style in such things, and a great thing to try and replicate should you so wish (and should you have the space in your own garden).

A very, very long time ago, I wrote a couple of blog posts showing pictures very similar to these.  It's interesting to come back and take another look at something that I saw four, five or six years ago.

I doubt these pictures show much in the way of my improvement when taking photographs.  There are only a finite number of vantage points by which you can view the castle, so I assume the pictures from before almost perfectly match up with these.  I wouldn't be surprised if they were in black and white too.

Anyway, that was the journey to Himeji and the surrounding gardens (and one or two other places I'm sure).  I think next up might be Kyoto, but I'll have to trawl the archives to find out.

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.

A Park and A Wheel

So last month (during the cherry blossom season) I went to a park with the camera in order to capture one or two of the trees in bloom.

I completely forgot about the picture until yesterday, when I had a day off and ventured into another park without the trees.

Some of these are from before - some from yesterday.  It's up to you to choose which are from which.

It wouldn't be a set of pictures from me without a black and white one.  This shows the texture of this rock pretty nicely I think.  Uninteresting for all but me, but this is my blog so tough.

Kasai Rinkai Koen has a lot of poppies blooming at the moment.  I don't know why; they certainly weren't there last year.

Maybe it changes yearly.

This is another shot of the same set of fields.

The ferris wheel will make a comeback later in the post.

This outcropping looked pretty nice with the reflection so I just took a quick snap.  It turned out to be one of my favourites.

This is a heron from a month or so ago.  He didn't seem to be too perturbed by the people passing by, we even saw him catching a couple of fish.

Bear in mind my lens is only a very mild zoom.

This blossom is pretty indicative of the millions of other cherry blossoms around Japan.  Once you've seen one of them, you've pretty much seen them all.

Having said that, when they're dropping they do look pretty incredible.

See?  This is a slightly lighter version of the one above.

I think this is a heron.  I've no idea what type.  It might not even be a heron, I don't know.  This one was slightly more shy, and the camera struggled with the whites so there's not much detail in the feathers.  Having said that, it's amazing how close you can get if you just go slowly.

And this is the next vision of the ferris wheel replete with bad elevator music.

Link Here!

And that's all for today.