Tokyo 7's

So I went to the Tokyo 7's this year.  The weather was better than last year, but not by much.  I didn't get to see the finals for reasons that I can't remember, but one of the guys had a friend who was taking pictures inside the press area, so I accompanied him while England were playing.  I got to see one of the finals against Argentina, and the team collect their trophy.  It was super nice of him, and it was a pretty unique experience.

Earlier I'd accompanied another TGRFC member to the press conference and got to ask the captains of Fiji, Samoa and New Zealand some questions.  They are all incredibly boring people.  Their answers were so dull that I can't even remember what I asked them.  God they are boring people.  Seriously.

Anyway, onto the pictures!

This is the legend Dan Norton.  I'm pretty sure he scored in that game, as he scores in most.  I believe he's the overall leading try scorer, not just for this year, but ever.

This is one of the Argentinian props.  I met him outside the hotel, and we had a quick chat.  Him and one of his colleagues were impressed by how clean Tokyo is.  They were real characters, and genuinely nice people.  Good luck to them in the future!

I took a few pictures of the crowd in such a way to make it look crowded, but by the other pictures you can tell that very few people turned up.  When the world cup rolls around, Japan is going to have embarassing attendences.

Another of the England flyers breaks out from his own try line.  Luckily a fight broke out right where I was standing, so they didn't advance very far, and I could take a number of pictures.

The man of the year, eating ramen.  Not healthy!  How will he get the award this year if he's fat?

This is the stereotypical shot of the Japanese team being beaten.  I mean playing.  I mean playing a losing.  By a lot.  It would be better if there were more people in the opposite stands, but they'd all be foreigners anyway.  No one in Japan likes rugby.

Tagged just before sneaking into the corner.  This picture is cropped pretty heavily so the quality is quite poor, but I like the three key members being mostly in focus and centre of the frame.

Another black and white of Dan Norton.  He really is the man.

The presentation of the shield or plate, I forget which competition they won, I only know it wasn't the important one.  Gutted.

TGRFC Friendly Versus Someone

This game was pretty strange, you can find the 'official,' write up here.  I wasn't playing, so I had the opportunity to take a few photographs.  Some of them came out well, one in particular is my favourite action shot from the two years I've had my camera.  I'll let you guess which one you think it is, and I'll let you know at the end.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Spaghetti legs.

Gareth is probably an inch or two taller than me, but due to his spaghetti legs he looks to be about seven feet tall.  In a unique way he also has spaghetti arms, which helps him score more tries than a second-row has any right to.  Many teams have fallen victim to the optical illusion of his torso versus limb ratio, which means they stop him nearer the line than they should and he simply reaches over the whitewash and plonks the ball down.

The enforcer.

Jesse is a pretty key player when in the loose, because of tackles like this one.  Keita came in with the follow up as Jesse dislodged the ball handily (heh.).  He used to play ice hockey, so I think that kind of physical mentality has helped him become a solid defender.

They don't use Gilbert for their games here, they use a bran I'd never heard of.  I find the absolute best way to prepare for international tournaments and international test matches is to change every single aspect of the preparation, so that when you arrive on the scene everything is brand new, different and intimidating.  Oh no wait, the opposite of what I just said.

This posed looking shot was actually from the warmup, where I was able to get close to everyone while they were doing drills.  The hardest thing with this camera is getting shots of far objects due to the lens, so to be able to walk right up to the guys was a massive help.  Obviously that wasn't possible during the game, so a lot of shots went begging.

I don't know this guys real name, all I know is he's called viking.  His round face belies a bedrock player in the scrum, who is key for all the set pieces.

A little scrum half with ball in hand.  I quite like the motion of the ball in this picture, it gives it energy.

Another forward, this time one more mobile around the park and willing to support.  Gorka, the Spanish (Basque) forward who has scored only one try for the gaijin.

Keita, normally a scrum-half but who played at ten on this day, is one of the players for Lion.  He also plays for Canon who are in the top division of rugby in Japan.  I don't really know how that works, but he only works half days and spend the rest of the time training.  Lucky bastard.

The new captain for this year is the Welshman, Rich.  In a team of lanky people, he's probably the lankiest of them all.

Shin got player of the year last year, and the year before, so he's the man to beat this year.  With tries like this it won't be easy.

And the culmination of his efforts.  Placed perfectly on the line, just so everyone knows how precise he is.  Of course being Japanese, the hand placement isn't exactly in the middle, and his hands are  pretty dirty so it's not ideal, but it'll do.



So which one is my favourite?  I think there's one clear winner in this group of pictures, and that's the second to last one.  The movement is a big distracting, but the face is clear enough that you can still see the look of joy on his face.  Or is that pain?  I have no idea.

So I DID go Skiing

So I did, in the end, go skiing with dad.  There are a fair number of good photographs, but these ones are the ones which remind me of travelling around and jumping headfirst into the snow.



I have a feeling that those fresh tracks in the background might have been me or dad.


That green jacket is absolutely fantastic.  Before I tried it, I assumed that all jackets had small flaws in their design.  My current jacket is pretty damned waterproof for a ten year old skiing jacket, but the pockets are a pain in the jacksie, and the place where you put the ski passes is inconvenient.  This jacket has it all - it's waterproof to the Nth degree, it breathes really well, and it's damn near luminescent.  What more could you ask for?

I stole dads bright green jacket, so he had this much more modest number.

It's really difficult to appreciate just how mountainous Japan is, until you see it first hand.  Even looking at the interior (which is about 75% of the land in reality) on a map doesn't prepare you for the Alps style perilous drives through the mountains.  There were a few moments where I thought we might void the insurance on our little rental car, but it turned out okay.

Top tip, if you ever need to rent a car in Japan, don't use Nippon Rentacar!  They are terrible.  You aren't allowed to leave the parking area in their cars if you are a foreigner, let alone drive in rain or SHOCKED GASPS, snow.

You're much better off renting from a company vendor like Honda, which is where we got our car from.  The guys were really nice despite my incompetent Japanese, and everything went off without a hitch.  We brought the car back a day early because we forgot which day we were supposed to go back, but that gave us a chance to pick up some souvenirs.  All part of the plan!  Kind of.

The mountains aren't as dramatic as Europe (or I imagine Canada) in terms of their sheer size, but they go on forever in all directions.

Unfortunately I couldn't work out the settings on my camera to capture it, but the snow was melting/freezing constantly which led to a crystalline effect in the snow, reflecting the light in tiny diamond like spots.  It was really fascinating (for me, anyway) because I've been skiing any number of times, but this was the first time I've seen this effect so vividly displayed.  You'll have to take my word for it...

Version 2.0

The blog will be going up when I get my next position sorted.

In the meantime, make a blogspot/blogger/gmail account and add this blog to your watched list, because version 2.0 will only be accessible by those on my confirmed list.  The outside world will never know!

I'll make a separate blog, or possibly even an entirely new website for photographs, so if all you want to see is pictures, there's no need to sign up.

I Will Get Round to It

I will write more blog posts and share more pictures - when I don't have broken fingers and I have a job come April, which I don't right now.  Check back in a few weeks.

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.

Snowboarding, Skytree and Tall Buildings

I broke one of my fingers, making this post a pain in the ass to go with the pain in the phalanges. As such, it'll be shorter than normal by virtue of the fact that I'm not particularly masochistic.

It's a dogs life, being a cat in Japan.

So dad came over to Japan for a couple of weeks.  He wanted to see some big buildings (we'll get to that), some high technology (no pictures of that, but we saw an 80 inch LCD and glasses that are also entertainment centres replete with virtual 42 inch screens) and snow.

We also saw a cat tied up outside a house like a dog.  (See above)

We also went on the bullet train, which I always enjoy even if there's standing room only.  Despite my best efforts I couldn't add to my burgeoning trainspotter collection, but this picture is passable.

The crowds can be overwhelming, even for locals.

This picture was a complete surprise when I was casually flicking through my stash.  In terms of crowd photographs, it's entirely stereotyped.  One person looking back directly at the camera, an entire crowd of people heading in the opposite direction has been done to death - but at least it's one picture I now have in my portfolio.  Check that box.

This gaudy, outright disgusting building is for a company that made its name, and presumably all its money, selling beer.  The golden sides represent the sides of a glass, the top is the foam.  In Japan you'll be lucky if fifty percent of your beer is actually liquid - they love stealing an ever increasing number of millilitres from customers in the name of profit; under the guise of authenticity (it's how they do it in Europe!).

These aren't the most interestingly coloured  fortunes, but they're among the most plentiful.

During New Years celebrations, you get a fortune from one of the shrines and you tie it to one of the designated ropes that surround the shrine.  Traditionally you'd tie it to a branch, but having to clean up a million of those would get to be a chore pretty quickly I'd imagine.

There's a nice symmetry in this one.

So this is a fairly typical image in Japan, albeit usually more colourful (New Years spirit and all that).  I don't know the man who was tying the wish, but it was kind of weird taking the picture with him looking at me like I was a maniac.  I gave him a quick nod and went about my business - he didn't seem to be too miffed.  Who knows, maybe he went home and told his missus that a weird foreigner took his picture at the shrine.

No flinching!  I still wake up face down lying horizontally across my futon with the duvet hanging from the lampshade - I can't imagine how twitchy I was when I was that young.

This kid was absolutely dead to the world.  As with all these things I only had a few seconds to take the picture (we were heading into a burger king (my third fast food place in 3 months, it's becoming habitual now!) and my group wouldn't want to wait around, plus the dad was waiting to move the kids head to make it more comfortable, graciously allowing me to take the picture) but I'm happy enough with how it came out.

So let's get this out of the way.  The new bullet train looks like a penis.  You were thinking it, I was thinking it; everyone thinks it.  Now, in order to take an interesting picture I tried my best to accentuate the phallic properties, but due to a combination of lighting, placement and lack of imagination, I couldn't really get the picture I wanted.  As such, here is the shot with no real adjustment or alteration.

The grime is their glass, not mine!

So this is one of many shots taken from the top of the skytree.  I don't get vertigo - I'm not afraid of heights to a degree beyond what most would consider normal, (I'd go skydiving in a heartbeat, and I've done all manner of elevated adventure based activities) but this was really weird.  I wouldn't say frightening, but it was certainly disorientating.

Until we went up to the top of the skytree, this would have sufficed as the 'big building,' part of the trip.  Along with the other one I took in Shinjuku, this building actually looks pretty similar to this picture when viewed with the naked eye.  It's very tall!

Looking out over this river (I don't know the name) with the gaudy beer building on the left, you can see how calm the day was.  It was extremely cold, but it meant cloudless skies and blue waters; something I appreciated with the camera.  One thing I had to do in post processing was scale back the sun - it was taken in the evening and a full third of the frame was washed out whiteness.  Whether you like this artificially diminished sun style is subjective, but it lets the building outlines stand out a little more.

I'm not sure what it looks like, but I enjoy seeing it whenever I walk past.

This was the other building, remarkable for being ruddy wide to boot.  There is no end to interesting shapes within the architecture of Japan, but there is a definite lack of coherent planning among the wards.

I wanted to take a photo through the airholes looking in, but the owner was so keen to show it off that they unzipped the front, revealing a thoroughly fed-up looking creature.

This was the picture to best describe how I assume that dog felt.  We saw not one, not two, but fully three animals being taken somewhere on public transport.

The crowds at the shrines and temples were quite big, but no one was wearing traditional garb.  It was quite surprising how many people were out for what is, essentially, a Western holiday.  Chinese New Year is sometimes in February (it changes every year) and I'd imagined that to be far bigger.  More people seem to dress up, in my experience at least.

May look tired, but not shy of shouting in your face with a gigawatt megaphone from four feet.

The police lines were more akin to riot control than simple temple visitation.  The poor bastards carrying the signs and loudspeakers looked like they'd been doing it all day.  At least the Japanese are notoriously docile.  I suspect you'd have more trouble with that bored looking dog than any number of locals.

In space, no one can hear the shutter.

This is one of the pictures from the sky tree.  There really are very few pictures that don't  outright look better in black and white.  I'd like to blow your mind and say that the curvature you see is the earth - but that would require me being somewhere near space and for that river to actually be an ocean.  It's the distortion from the widest angle of my lense.

This amazing set of steel (is it steel?) tubes is but a tiny fraction of number of inter-locking parts that combine to make the sky tree.  It's all symmetrical, it all fits together nicely - except when you look at the entire structure from the side and from a long way away.  It actually leans slightly, making it quite unsettling in a kind of 'do they know it's doing that?' kind of way.

This is another of the mild telephoto shots from the top of the second tallest building in the world.  After taking this a kid ran face first into my camera.  After realising it had fucked up (it looked up, as I looked down with a glare of concentrated death planted upon my features) it ran towards the negligent human being who can, presumably, lay claim to being the father.  It then proceeded to create more noise than is right for something of that size, or for something of such insignificance.

The kid fucking up netted me being called a stupid foreigner by a group of locals, and a bloody great smudge on my lense (I know it's spelled lens by the way).  Luckily I use a UV filter for just such occasions (things outside of your control happen regularly in such confined quarters) so I wasn't particularly perturbed after a cursory inspection of the glass.  Those Japanese people, that kid, and the asshole parents who were letting a three year old run around unsupervised, waiting to be kidnapped or (hopefully) beaten up, can all die in a fire.  Tomorrow, if you'd all be so gracious.

I have no idea how, but I accidentally semi lomo'd this picture by completely messing up the colours and exposure.  Of course I have no idea how any of that works and I let my camera sort that stuff out, so I can't claim credit (hence the accidentally), but with a few more colour modifications this picture could turn out looking really crappy, which is good.  Apparently.

Yet another picture of Tokyo.  It really is a spectacular view and it shows you just how big Tokyo is.  It goes on forever in every direction.

To give you an idea of how big the tower itself is, you can see it (a hazy outline massively blown up, from a picture taken on a clear day, in a tourist pamphlet) from Nagano, where we went skiing.  That's 250km+ away.

One of the biggest shrines in Tokyo, with massive groups of people only allowed in every few minutes.  We walked in the side door, bypassing the queue entirely.

Most people here will run a chainsaw filled gauntlet in their underwear before having the pictures taken by a stranger.  On this day, people were different.  It must be the festival-like atmosphere that causes the change, but I doubt I'll ever have another opportunity to find so many people willing to be shot by a foreigner.  Some even look at you!

Some amazing colours and patterns.

We went to Harajuku which is where all the dancing Elvises (Elvi? Elivisis?) and kids dressed up like cartoon characters gather.  Alas, on this cold day, all we saw were two women wearing the traditional getup, being interviewed on camera.  They might be famous, or they might have been picked because of their clothing.  They were the only people we saw in the full regalia.

Some at 24mm, some at 105mm, none in-between.

Damn I took a lot of pictures of the cityscape.

One of the saving graces of black and white is that things don't need to be pin-sharp in order for the picture to work.  As such the low-light shots taken from the sky tree tend to work quite well.  This is one of the few pictures that was steady enough to highlight the details in colour.  There wasn't even enough room to put the camera down anywhere.

Details everywhere.

The golden stairs leading to the entrance to the waiting area for the line to buy the tickets to wait in line to get to the elevator that takes you to the midway station to get in line and wait to buy the tickets that ultimately let you in the second elevator that goes to the top.

This is a similar shot to the black and white one above, in that it's been done a thousand times before.  At least I can cross this one off too.

So apparently there aren't any snow or skiing pictures in this batch, but I'll get around to adding those at some point.  If you visit Tokyo I would definitely recommend going to the skytree.  It's best at night (I've not been during the day, but I can't imagine it being as good) so go around 4 pm, pick up a ticket to get in around 8ish and then go do something else for a few hours, to keep yourself occupied.  It's bloody expensive, but you'll only ever do it once and you can take some great pictures, so I would say it's worth going all the way to the top - even if you have to pay twice for the privilege.