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!

Bumper Buggy Bugger Blamers?

So it's been a long time since I last wrote something for the blog. Partly (mostly) to do with laziness, but partly due to a lack of interesting things to write about. In order to remedy this situation I spent thirty minutes on Sunday getting sunburnt in order to bring you a picture of two of interest.

Firstly, I was in the sun with my shirt off for thirty to forty minutes. Secondly, it's not full blown Summer yet, in fact it's barely what one might graciously call the end of Spring (it's absolutely heaving down at the moment, and has done since the morning). As such I thought it might be safe to stand around outside for a while, but I was completely wrong as it turned out.

I think this lot looks pretty cool to be honest. If I had any amount of land whatsoever I'd set aside a percentage of it to see what happened. In this instance a bag of compost with two 5 centimetre squares cut out of the top was left outside over Winter. When I got back to it I found this lot.

I have no idea how many species are in there, but with those strange flowers I should imagine a fair few insects would like to rummage around – assuming an area large enough to sustain an ecosystem. Of course these two small bags are not big enough by a long shot, but the amount of plant stuff going on in there with zero care is preeeeetty coooooool.

In the meantime I'd been growing up some strawberries from seed. I found out the usual method for growing strawberries was from the runners they produce (kind of like the spider plant I assume) which are coerced into a nearby pot, then snipped once the new plant is growing. This umbilical system ensures a new plant sprouts very quickly, which is great, and it means that if you get in early in the year you can have a fruiting plant the same year, which is also great. The problem is I can't find anywhere around me that sells them. I also couldn't find anyone that sells the seeds (the aforementioned method being so much preferred that no one bothers with seeds). As such, I had my mum purchase some seeds for me, which ended up coming from China of all places, which she then sent to me.

Modern sustainable sourcing of plants at its finest.



Anyway, they were up and running, and needed a new place to live.

While growing these strawberries I was also doing this:

Which is to say taking very blurred pictures. Quality aside, these are beans. Or at leas they will be in the future. Hopefully. These went into the now empty bags of compost to create this:

If my melon disaster has told me anything it's that there's no way to tell how this will turn out, even if they grow twenty feet tall like the melons did. Just as things are flowering, fruiting and so on, there's sure to be a disaster of melon ending proportions.



I really, REALLY didn't want to use chemicals to control the insects last time (not because of holistic therapeutic arm wavey pseudo scientific hippy bullshit, but because it feels like cheating) but without a surrounding ecosystem to support the animals that could predate potential pests, there's really no way of getting around their use.

With the crowded strawberries replanted into individual pots we'll see how things turn out. With the amount of rain we've had today I don't think the dozen small holes I poked into the bags will be enough to allow all the water to drain away. Then again, a ten foot diameter pipe would probably have trouble draining all that rain away.


Anyway, that's all for the flowers at the moment. The strawberries grew quickly at first but slowed down. The beans come out guns blazing, with roots and leaves absolutely everywhere within a week. We'll see which one ends up being the winner by the end of Summer, if indeed either survive.

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!

Skiing in Pictures

So I went to Hakuba a while ago for some snowboarding.  We went for the weekend, arriving early Saturday morning and staying overnight.  The hotel was, like all Japanese hotels in the mountains, old and grubby, but the town was pretty nice.  It was obviously styled after a european town, but no one managed to get to europe before they did so.  Everything looks like a disney town from the 70's, plastic and glass fibre which is kind of weird, but also fun.

The skiing was okay, but the snow was terrible.

It started raining on the Saturday night and didn't stop on Sunday, so we decided to abort the Sunday skiing and check out the town.

There were a few quite interesting places to visit in the town, including a place to make some glassy stuff (pictures at some point later) that we did.  Walking around with the clouds and the mountains gives a pretty cool (haha!) effect whenever the sun comes out, in that the roads heat up and create great swathes of mist, which form fog, which cool the place back down, which clears the fog, which then let's the sun through and so on.  It happened a few times while we were walking around and enabled a couple of these pictures where everything seems foggy and mysterious.

It was difficult to tell when it was going to stop raining, so when it did we ran around taking pictures and trying not to step in the lakes that had formed about the place.

I'm not sure whether I like this picture, but it has a light and a dark half which is kind of cool.

My favourite snow based machine.  These are everywhere as you might imagine.

See how filthy that snow is?  That's because they hadn't had snow in weeks by the time we got there.  The conditions were downright bad for skiing.  It snowed the day after we left.

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.

Disappointing Haul

Got the film back, not very many good pictures.

They were all too dark which isn't surprising considering the people pictures I took were at a late hour, but most disappointing were the fireworks pictures.  None of them turned out particularly well.  At least I know to do something like this all digital in the future.

Anyway, here are the ones I could salvage.

This is obviously too dark.  If I had some kind of flash, or a helper holding a reflector, maybe that would have helped.  It's a shame because the colours of their outfits were quite nice, hence the desire to take a picture in the first place.  Lesson learned!

The smoke in the foreground is alright, it takes up a little too much of the frame though.

Probably the best one of the analogue pictures, a nice gradation from top to the middle, fading towards black at the bottom.

All I need now is a nice scanner and a really nice printer, and then I can start getting high quality copies done!  No need for crappy jpg's on a DVD with that gear.

You can watch the highlights reel here, or see the digital pictures (which I much prefer on this occasion) here.

Because I'm a Massive Idiot

So the negatives you get with medium format are essentially the same as those with 35mm.  You get a line of pictures, someone in the bowels of the photolab decides where to cut, you get another line and so on.  As such, you'd think it'd be particularly easy for someone to not lose negatives, on account of them all being attached to one another.

I keep my stuff in a folder that's designed to hold large film, you can hold it up to the light and see which picture is which.  Thanks to the fairly large format you can even get a good idea of which picture is which.

Unfortunately I've somehow managed to lose a picture.  A single picture.  I have no idea how it happened on account of all the pictures being adjacent to at least one other photograph in the sequence in which they were taken.

I only found out I've lost a photo because I'm going to go to the printers and get some bigger ones made over the weekend, just to see what they turn out like.  In case you're wondering, the one I lost is on this page.  It's the first one, with the very red leaves.  Not a huge loss, but it's a picture I still like for the colour.

A long time ago I lost some digital photographs that I loved, at which point I realised that digital archiving is a real thing and if you want to keep your stuff safe you need to engage with some kind of backup system.  I still don't have off-site storage figured out (the price is prohibitive) which means that if this house burns down, or more likely, is shaken to the ground and then burns down, I'll lose everything.  On the other hand I've isolated my pics to the extent where it's away from the internet, and safe from prying eyes.  Relatively.  Everything in this game is relative - there's no such thing as 'safe.'

Anyway, the upshot to all this thinking is that instead of waiting a couple of days to filter out my analogue photographs, sleeve them, tag them and bag them (as it were), I've got to do it immediately after they've been picked up.  I've also got to actually check the photographs when I get them from the printer just to make sure they don't miss out one on the end of a sequence.  It's unlikely that it'll happen, but I can't for the life of me think where this particular photograph has gone.  There's also the interesting question of archiving the film camera stuff.  The easiest way at this point would be to get a scanner and go nuts.  It's something to add to my lottery list after tripod, lenses, timelapse release and, of course, a wicked sick printer.

Digital filesystems are easy, analogue is much harder!

Cherry Blossoms

So it was quite a good week for taking pictures of flowers, cherry blossoms abound!

Unfortunately the cherry blossoms don't last particularly long, so I've only got a couple of pictures.  I took absolutely tons of them, but I didn't get any that were particularly interesting.  These two are decent enough to have a quick look at, in case you've forgotten what they look like since last year.

I went to shinjuku park which has hundreds of trees with dozens of varieties, so the colours were different from tree to tree.  Interestingly enough they were all shades of pink.  I wonder if it's simply impossible to breed them into different colours, or whether the idea of cherry blossom colour is so important to Japanese people that they refuse to try to make something a little more interesting.

There are, however, a million shades from white to bright pink.  This is one of the pinkest varieties I could find.  The centre mass is darker because of the shade, but you can see how delicate the petals actually are when the light shines through them, as in the edge petals.

The video is a better representation of the general blossomness in Japan as of last week, check it out!

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.