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.

The Cold! The Cold!

So I've caught a cold.

I hadn't slept in a few days (bar a few hours here and there) so I had to take a day off work yesterday.  I was basically carrying around the typical flu symptoms along with a severe case of zombie, and for some reason random nose bleeds, which led me to the conclusion that 'teaching,' a bunch of kids probably wasn't the best idea.

I managed to get some rest last night which led me being able to work today, which is good because money - but I'm starting to lose the energy I had at the beginning of the day.  Luckily my classes are complete and I only have to do typical busywork like making worksheets and whatnot, so the next couple of hours will pass quickly and I can get back to my sofa.

My fridge is currently a haven for unhealthy goods.  If there were a tax on owning unhealthy things I would be bankrupt with all the goodies I was sent over Christmas.  Yes, I am writing this from a place of smugness, and yes you will be jealous when you see the photograph with all the sweets I have.  But no, I am not giving you any.  They are all from england and good chocolate is rarer than wagyu beef here.

(...  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures on hand, so you will have to imagine the subtle golden halo and hymns that emanate from my open fridge.)

In other news, I tried to make a christmas dinner.

Coming into the endeavour with no experience I expected it to be a complete disaster, so I also made a backup meal of hamburgers.  In keeping with my attempts to make everything as difficult as possible, I bought ground beef and made them myself, topped and bottomed by rolls made from the home bakery.  The burgers were tasty.  Very, very tasty.

My mum sent me over some stuffing for the big occasion which ended up being some of the most delicious I've ever tasted (it's the same stuff we ate with every roast back home) and the chicken.  Well.  Only pictures will suffice in this instance.

Om nom nom.

It turns out that Japanese chickens are about half the size of english chickens, so the stuffing exploded out during cooking.  It didn't matter though, because the whole thing was unbelievably delicious.

If I'm using too many superlatives for your liking, please understand that I am a horrible cook and for a meal to end up edible, let alone tasty, is an accomplishment for the record books.

You might also notice that there aren't any vegetables.  This is because the chicken was more spread out when it was raw, and took up more of the dish, only to curl up when it was cooked.  The picture is also a little deceptive in that the dish itself is actually very small.  If I were to add potatoes and carrots, I would have to wedge them in between the chicken and the dish.  Hardly conducive to good browning I'd say!

Food nobbery(sic) aside, I'm glad I decided against adding veg because this whole endeavour took a bastard long time and was a pain in the backside.  Along with the burgers, ice cream and cake we made (those last two were group efforts) we ended up spending most of the day on the food.

Chocolate, ice cream, roast chicken, chocolate cake and burgers.  Now that's a christmas dinner.

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.

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.

Goddamnit, and Incredible Fireworks

So the Edogawa fireworks display is really big.  I don't know if it's the biggest in Japan, or whether it has any particular accolades in terms of size or variety, but just shy of a million and a half people view it yearly.  As such, it's a pretty big deal, and a large number of fireworks are thrown into the air for the occasion.

This year I wasn't in England and I had some time off from rugby so I decided to go along.

It's worth remembering that the Summer here is particularly warm, with the humidity also being a factor.

The result is that it gets unbearably hot during midday.

In order to secure a good spot to see the show it was necessary to go relatively early.  It began at 7.15, so we decided to head down around two o' clock, throw down a tarpaulin and sit under an umbrella.

Firstly, the place wasn't nearly as crowded as I was lead to believe it would be at this time.  With two people you could probably arrive around four thirty or five and still find space to sit down.  Whether it's always this easy is up for debate, but on the Chiba half of the river (the show is half paid for by the tokyo side of the river, and half by the chiba side) seating is a fairly simple affair.

The umbrella wasn't see-through, it was entirely opaque.  I still got burnt.  I have no idea how, but it happened.  It also wasn't big enough for my whole body (I need to get a fishing umbrella!) so I draped towels over my legs, making a kind of lean-to against the umbrella.

Long story short, it was hot.  It was too hot.  I do not recommend going before four P.M. for the simple fact that you will melt.  It was the hottest I have ever been while not playing sports, and it felt like I was going to die.  It was horrible.  Really, soul crushingly horrible.

As a caveat I'm the kind of person that would rather be too cold than too hot, so maybe it was just me.  There were a few intrepid locals sitting out in the sun, covered with only T-shirts, drinking beer.  Insane.  They weren't even sunburnt by the end of the day.  They must be made of radiators and zinc oxide.

Anyway, aside from nearly dying, I also fashioned a makeshift tripod.  Basically, there's no way to shoot long exposures without something to balance the camera on, that's why we have tripods.

None of my photographs are very good when you stop and look at them, but they hold up to a cursory glance for reasons that I'll explain later - but even getting these results took a bit of crafting.

I cut a slot into one big cardboard box and put a smaller one inside it at an angle, giving a fairly stable triangle.  I then taped it, cut wedges into the top, put towels over them and finally plopped the cameras on top.  It's good enough for video, the wobble is barely perceptible there, but for stills it's an entirely different story.

Before I get to the pictures, this boat sailed straight into this clearly marked area ignoring the obvious hazard, got caught up in some kind of net (dozens of fish made a bid for freedom when the propeller snagged) and burnt out their engine.  Seconds after this picture a big puff of black smoke emitted from the rear and lots of shouting happened.  I flitted between wanting to die from heat stroke and laughing at these idiots being hauled out of the net by a couple of other boats.  The women on the front did not move one iota the whole time.

When you're on the water, look out for buoys, people.

Anyway, onto the pictures.

It was a pretty day.  After my near death exposure experience there was a nice sunset.

There are only two pictures in landscape today, I learned something pretty quickly about which orientation suits fireworks the best.  Especially individual fireworks.

This is an odd one in that it's the only 100mm+ picture that wasn't a total mess.  Obviously the more zoomed in you are the more stable the platform needs to be, but I didn't realise quite how stable.  Cardboard doesn't cut it most of the time.

This is the other landscape.  It's also the only picture with more than one firework going off in the same frame.  If I had a tripod I could have taken a dozen pictures and overlayed them which can give a cool look with lots of simultaneous colours.

If you don't like this style of picture you can probably close the page now.

This is one of my favourites because it looks like a UFO.

This is another one of my favourites because it looks like a flower.

There was a lot of smoke in the air after only a few volleys which meant pictures often came out with the smoke effects you see here.  The top left of the flower at around 11 o' clock is hazy, residue from a past explosion.  There are also artifacts from reflected light lower down.  I could erase them but it's not really a true image then.

Not that 'true,' means anything in this digital age.

This is a bit earlier or later than the others, it shows the orange afterglow or initial explosion rather than the colours.

This is probably my favourite, just because of the mix of colours and the layers, central bright with a petal texture looking outwards.  Just like a flower.

 So if you enlarge any of these pictures and look at the lines of light, you'll notice that they wobble, they're not perfectly straight.  This is where a good base come in handy, it stops that tiny amount of shake and keeps every line looking pristine.  Or at least as it would look in real life.

I don't really like the colour of this one, but it's nice to have context in the form of some housing in the distance below.

The same with this one, the colours are bad but at least there is a wonky horizon, so the firework has a little more context.

 This is another of my favourites, it's super blurred (artistic effect, if anyone asks) but it's a nice colour.  If only all the pieces would come together every time!

 I like the colours here, I like how the horizon is almost straight, and I like the light pollution coming from the city.  It just doesn't grab me for some reason.  Taking 'dem pictures is hard.

This isn't a sharp picture, nor does it have interesting colours, but it's probably my favourite.  Have I already said that?  Either way, I'll probably make it my phone background at some point.

This last one I've chopped up to make it look like some strange sea creature.  Or a bizarre cell.  Or an artists rendition of a crazy quantum experiment.  Or one of those plasma balls.

I would also mention that the wind was in our faces, meaning we were absolutely pelted with the detritus from the explosions.  We were covered in soot, charred paper and big lumps of cardboard by the end of it.  It might be worth bringing something with a peak to cover your eyes, even if only a marginal improvement over your hands.  It definitely added excitement to proceedings because it's pitch black directly in front of you and it's hard to see when you're about to be clocked upside the head.

Hopefully some of that will show through in the video.

That's it.  I got quite a few shots I like, and one or two that will go into the 'keepers,' collection, which is a rare thing indeed for a single outing (for me at least)!

I also shot some video, it's taking a while to edit but I'll put it up here when it's done.

Oh, and some film too.  That'll be done in a month or so.  Exciting.