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.

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.

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.

Film Camera

So, first things first, let's answer the questions.  I can't look at the questions while I'm writing this because of the unique way blogger is designed. So...

Musical Interlude...

Anonymous asks - 'is it just me or do you not get the contrast with film?'

Ok by no means am I an expert, but I feel like the mess of post-production tools available to most people nowadays essentially means that contrast is taken to extremes.  Basically, people find the contrast slider and before they do anything else, they push that to the maximum setting.  The result is that every single black and white image now has an incredible contrast, basically ranging from the whitest a screen can display through to the deepest blacks.  We've been spoiled by the incredible ability to create drama in an image that didn't originally have any.

Having said that, the images that came out most contrasty with the film camera were the ones that were perfectly exposed, so I think there is a lot of light metering and/or good guesswork involved to ensuring the best images.

You absolutely can get extremely rich, extremely contrasty images with film, but you can't move a slider to make it happen so I think it's a lot rarer and based more upon the circumstances and photographer.

It's worth pointing out that I got them on the PC by using a 600dpi scanner attached to an all in one home office solution - as such, these scans are what can only be described as garbage.  The only one that comes close to representing the images I hold in my hand, is the woman standing behind the robo-parrot.  Even that one is roughly a nautical mile away from showing the clarity of the actual image.  The scanner shows up imaginary scratches and blots that aren't present in the actual images; more frustratingly it made some of the images sepia!  What in the what?

Anyway, onto the last question:  The colour one is actually a picture I took in Japan to show that George Lucas sold out thirty years ago, and continues to sell out now.  Yoda selling curry!  Ol' George has made me use two exclamation marks in two paragraphs, but I feel it quite necessary.  Yoda selling curry!

Ok so mum lent me her film camera (Ricoh Sr-10?  It's a Ricoh something) while I was in England, and I started off with some colour film that grandad had storing in the fridge.  Considering the film was a decade old, the pictures that came out were pretty darned good (quality, if not content wise).  This got me wondering about shooting using black and white film, so I ordered 5 rolls off tinternet.

3 weeks (3 weeks, what the hell.  No wonder this crap went out of fashion) later it arrived and I started yomping around with my film and digital SLR's in tow.

I immediately binned the first roll of film because I'm a complete moron - that left me with four rolls.  I took the first around the geek convention with me, and a couple around the RSPB show along with Fowlmere.  This one is from the show, and just nudges past my quality control limits in the sharpness department.  I was clearly focussing on some distant unseeable gnat in the next county, but having a narrow aperture meant it came out kind of okay.

This one is from Fowlmere and I was interested to see if standard landscape photography is viable with black and white.  You see cityscapes depicted in black and white all the time (the lack of colour gives the image, for lack of a better word, 'gritty,' realism) but rarely natural landscapes (past the advent of colour, anyway).  If you look really carefully at the picture, there are a number of interesting lines moving from the left towards the middle - regarding the question about contrast I think this would have looked better were that central flowing line more pronounced.

That brighter line in the middle is actually a break in the clouds.  As an image it's entirely unexceptional, but it really makes you think about how light will be represented with black and white because the result was entirely unexpected (for me).

At the geek convention there was a hall of steampunk, and this converted radio thing was one of the items for sale.  It turns out that polished brass comes out rather nicely in black and white as the reflections work really well.  I love the detail of the lightning power conductor/battery thing.  The whole point of these things seems to be pointless excess, I'm pretty sure only two of those switches work, one to turn it (whatever it actually is) on, and one to change a parameter (maybe volume, maybe station, maybe something else?).

This is one of the pictures that I really like.  The scan makes it looks like I dragged this negative through a thorn bush, had it X-rayed (which it was) and then cleaned the kitchen with it, but when you see the image in person it's actually very clean.  There's way less hipstermatic noise and very little in the way of scratching.  The only real blemish is on the neck, where those white blotches are apparent.  I have no idea why the scanner picks all this nonsense up, but it did.

This is a copy of the digital one I took from before.  I wanted to compare the digital to the analog.  This picture is far less sharp and the ISO 400 film I used shows some grain (in the physical copy it's noticeable, if barely, in the digital image it looks like it was printed using a 4 foot brush and operated by a toddler).  It's interesting that I like both images, but the subtle differences in sharpness and contrast really give a different 'feel,' (technical term) to the image.  One is more inviting, whereas the other tends to be more matter-of-fact.

Yeah I don't really know what that means either, but it made sense in my head before I typed it out.

It made this picture sepia for some reason.  Yeah I don't know why.

Argh I got too close!  I swore to myself I wouldn't do it again.  I was trying to get the back half in focus but instead managed to get only the salmon sashimi.  Damnit.  This was the sushi restaurant in London.  The best Salmon sushi I've tasted to date, but also the worst tuna.  You win some, you lose some.

This is probably my favourite picture.  The woman in the background absolutely makes it.

It made this one sepia too.  I had to shoot this one with a really slow shutter speed so it's not particularly sharp, but I like the effect even down to the hint of business you can see through the back window.

This was actually taken in the sushi restaurant.  This scan is utter dogpants, but the physical image is really nice.  The image is extremely simple and, wait for it, the contrast between the light top right quarter and the rest of the image along with the shape of the circular thingy, really make the image stand out.

I really like this one.

This is another one I particularly enjoy.  It was an experiment to see whether you can successfully get entirely black and entirely white in one image with film.  The answer is probably, but it turns out that having a light area entirely engulfed in dark areas makes for some quite interesting pictures.

This one is all about shapes.  I just plopped mums camera on the floor, pointed it upwards and took a picture.  That's also how I got the pictures of the mushrooms from before.  Focus is absolutely critical with this one, because if the shapes aren't apparent, if they aren't crisp, the picture fails.

This is also one I really like just because this is a small park area for kids to play in.  They always look melancholic at 1AM, which is a good time to go out and take pictures.  Just keep an eye out for drug addicts.

These are onions.  Just lots and lots of onions.  If I were to shoot it again I'd turn them ninety degrees so that the onion bodies were the foreground, and that heap of stems/stalks would subsequently be in the background.  I think it'd balance the image a bit better.

I absolutely love rain, but it's damned difficult to take a picture of.  This was an experiment to see what raindrops look like in b/w.  It turns out they show up really nicely on dark leaves, so the only question left is - how can I exploit that in another image?

It's a crying shame that this one didn't come out.  What's happened is that I've under or over exposed this picture dramatically, meaning the people at the shop have had to either push it or pull it to make the image.  In essence, I messed up and they tried to fix it, causing all the grain to stand out massively.  It looks worse in this scan, but it is really bad in person too.

This is another one of my favourites because it came out so contrasty.  I like how the lizard is blending in with the shadow, because that's what lizards do.  The grain in the wood is also exceptionally fine, showing that the quality of the materials at my disposal was top-notch.

This is the ropes course in black and white.  The sky is rather featureless, but the trees in the background at a bit of interest outside the obvious.

The climbing wall.  This came out a bit dull in the scan, but there is more detail in the original.  Apparently 600dpi isn't enough.

This was Jackies first car apparently.  We came across it in a garden centre, so I took the rather typical shot of it looking along the length from the rear tail light.

This is a view from the farm, looking down towards one of the big lakes.  It's all rather wonky and when I look at the level of the horizon it makes me feel a bit seasick.

This is one of those classic nothing shots.  The flowers are kind of nice, but fully 2/3 of the frame is an indistinguishable mass of leaves that have no definite shape.  I'm convinced there's a picture in there somewhere, I just haven't found it yet.

This is another one of that car (I forget what kind it is, a ford cortina something or other).  Originally I tried to hint at the fact it was being restored, with the covering rags only being glimpsed at - but now I think the opposite tack would have made the pictures more interesting.  By tucking it away and only showing a glimpse of the care, it might have been a more interesting shot.  Then again the owner might have been pissed off if he'd have walked into the greenhouse and I was messing around with his car.

This enormous dragonfly was hovering around patrolling his territory.  It's a shame you can barely see a blip in the picture, let alone detect the shape of a dragonfly.  What I like about this picture is the background however, as it's a really nice fallen leag pattern.  The leaves are under water, so they sit rather lightly on each other to give a depth you don't see when they're sitting on the ground.  I've tried taking pictures of lots of small leaves layered on top of the each other, but it looks incredibly flat.  Doing the same through water gives an interesting effect, I think.

This is another sepia one for no apparent reason.  Apparently Jackie is quite hard to take pcitures of without her pulling a face, but here she is.

This one is all about reflections.  Again, I really like the shapes but I do wonder if this picture, in colour, would stand out more.

This is really annoying because I hate dogs, and this dog is pretty stupid as they go.  But the picture came out well, and as begrudging as I am, it can't be helped.

Stupid dog.

This one reminded me of those school pictures you get where one eye is half open and the other is half closed, with a sticker on it saying 'quality control.'  Those pictures look awful, but this one still look like grandad is laughing.

You never see wildlife in black and white.  Wildlife is all about colours and spectacle, but what happens when the wildlife you're observing is dull, like this particular bird.  The only colour it sported was brown, and dull was the byword during its evolution.  So why not black and white?

This is another quality control one.  I only included it because of the face Ray is pulling.  D'awww, cheeky chappy.

Grace flexing her biceps, looking stern.

Simon, probably looking at the stupid dog.  Wilcoxes tend to take decent pictures.  Good job guys!

Another sepia one.  I honestly have no idea why.

It's not a duck.  But in profile, it's pretty hard for me to guess what kind of bird it is.  It probably flies.

There was obviously a tense conversation happening when I took these, as everyone (even Grace) had serious face syndrome.

Except mum.

And finally the last one!  Wow.

I shot three rolls of film because I binned one before I started, then the camera packed up before I could use the last roll.  In all, that was 108 pictures, of which you just looked at around 30.  Of those 30 I would say around 20 are worthwhile.

Just under a 20% success rate!  Not bad for a first foray into black and white, and a second into film.