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.

The Vanity Post

So this post will be all about me.  As if all the others aren't in some way centred around myself...

So I hate pictures of myself.  I despise them.  I loathe them.

The only way I can bear to look at myself in a photograph is if it's an action shot, kind of like these:

I'm actually bending down quite a lot in this

I can't remember when this one was taken, or why there was a man (or woman?) in a dog suit.  This kind of stuff is incredibly common in Japan, and I've missed many an opportunity to have this picture taken.  Everyone who comes here has to take this picture once.  Then never again.

This was a game against the blue team, playing for the Tokyo Gaijin (foreigners).  I can't remember the score, or what happened, but I'm going to assume it was a good game.  I have no contrary feelings to indicate that it wasn't, so let's stick with that.

Oblivious to the mall in the background, gumshield behind the ear

This is definitely a commercial for water.  Or bottles.

This game was a blowout.  We won by a hundred points or so.  Not a very interesting game, but a good fitness session because everyone was running backwards and forwards across the entire length of the pitch, every few minutes.  It felt that way at least.



Actually paying attention this time

 So I keep my gumshield behind my ear because it's the most convenient place to put it.  Other times I tuck it into my compression shorts, but I wasn't wearing any on account of it being a million degrees in Japan.

It look like I'm about to get smashed.

I recently caught some bizarre diseases, which meant I lost a bit of weight.  I've since put some of it back on, but as you can see from my legs, almost everything I lost was fat.  Not complaining mind.

This was a different set of games - the gaijin went to Yamanashi (a prefecture south of Tokyo) to play a couple of back to back games against a conglomerate team.  It was pretty hard work, as the weather was sweltering.

This picture shouldn't be enjoyable, there's way too much blur.  But for some reason I really like it.  I did score, in case you were wondering.

You always look cool in b/w

 It always looks good when you have an action shot with the other guy sprawled on the floor.

After a hard half of rugby, some kind of commercial shoot involving shampoo (or maybe aftershave) is in order.  Obviously I didn't take any of these pictures, but I think they came out really well.  Good job!

So Apparently, I Didn't Go Snowboarding

I'm pretty sure I have a load of snowboarding pictures somewhere, I just can't seem to find them.  They must be at home somewhere, sitting in a back corner of the now full two terabyte drive I've filled up with pictures.  The problem is that I'm too spineless to delete anything - I always say I'll go back and look them through, deleting the stinkers (but I never do).  I'll get round to it one day.

The other problem is that the workflow with .craw (canon raw files?  I don't know what their extension is) is horrendous.  I have to take the .raw (30 megs per picture) convert it into a digital negative (.dng I think?) which is some number of megabytes big (another 30 or so, most likely) and then convert them all to low quality jpg's so I can view them with a standard picture viewer (I haven't found a standard picture viewing replacement that supports .dng).  It's all a bit of a faff, and requires voluminous disks the likes of which are too expensive for me to purchase at this time.  The result is an incredible lack of space that's forcing me to delete things; that being something with which I've never had much truck.

So, here I am with no snowboarding pictures to show you at the moment, but rest assured that they're out there, somewhere in the vast wilderness that comprises the digital landscape of my computer.  I'll get them up, sooner or later.  In the meantime, here are some other I took.

This guy was painting dragons in the style that is traditional to the area, a highly stylised asian dragon (think long, thin, living in the sky rather than breathing fire and sleeping on gold).  They were relatively cheap, and absolutely perfect for framing and hanging.

This fountain represents the dragon pretty well.  This photo neglects the serpentine body in favour of highlighting the absolutely evil eyes.

This is a close-up of some gold-leaf panel work.  I gave it the black and white treatment in order to focus attention on the detail of the work, and the roughness of the top.

This was a homeless guy we found in exactly the same place on two separate days, weeks apart.  I'm not entirely sure he was alive but I was convinced by my companions that he was.

For some reason a lot of Japanese people like this picture.  Wabi sabi!

This is a wide-angle view of the artist as he wrote on the dragon picture.  I can't remember what he's writing, but it's probably of artistic merit.

This is absolutely one of my favourite pictures ever.  The second I took it I said 'I will like this picture when it comes out,' which isn't something I've ever said before.  Perhaps I like it because I said I would, in which case I should say it more often.  Perhaps I like it because it contains fire and I'm secretly a pyromaniac.

And this is one that contains snow.  Probably more to come next time.