Zach awry in Japan

28 November 2010 Flowing Water at Nanzenji

I’m into flowing water these days. Last Nanzenji post.

28 November 2010 More from Nanzenji

Here are a couple more from our recent trip to Nanzenji. The fall foliage was glorious blah blah blah. These are more interesting (to me) than photos of things created by people explicitly for the purpose of having their photo taken (or would have had there been cameras x00 years ago).

Now this guy has the right approach to teaching his daughter how to tackle things bigger than she is.

27 November 2010 More Photos from Nanzenji

Here are some more photos that I took from our trip to Nanzenji with my mom, Maki, Genbo and Zoe. These two are HDR, or high dynamic range, photos. That means I mix three exposures for each image; one taken “dark”, one “normal”, and one “light”. This is useful in scenes that combine very dark parts and lighter parts, because the camera does not have as much range as your eye in finding detail in light and dark at the same time.

Take this shot with the leaves, for instance: the sun was shining directly on the leaves, making them very bright. Meanwhile, the wall and tiles were in shadow. If I had exposed for the very bright leaves, then everything else would have been dark. And, exposing for the tiles on top of the wall would have totally blown out the highlights in the leaves. So, I combined three exposures in Photomatix, which a pretty good result, I think.

Similarly, I love how you can see down into this stump. Your eye can do it, because it benefits from millions of years of evolution, but CCD sensors simply aren’t that good. If I had kept the shutter open long enough to resolve the shadowed area at the very bottom, everything else would have been very overexposed. So, I used three shots. If only we could do this in more areas of life.

20 November 2010 OK, first real fall foliage post

So I upgraded to a D7000 yesterday, giving my mom the old trusty D90 in trade. (Thanks mom!)

I want to play with it, but I have been swamped with work. So, today I found a fallen leaf on my way to Starbucks to do some translation, and snapped this photo in between paragraphs. I like the new camera a lot.

18 November 2010 Beauty of the fall foliage in Kyoto (or not)

Practically half the country of Japan and some good percentage of the rest of the world descends on Kyoto in the spring for cherry blossoms and the fall for the autumn foliage. Today we went to the very famous Nanzenji temple to take in the fall colors. I would normally strenuously avoid such a big tourist spot at the height of the tourist season, but today we have my mom visiting, so I made an exception and decided not to be a grumpy old man.

I love this shot because it illustrates how clueless little kids can be about their surroundings. As long as she has her little styrofoam plane in hand and her brother to play with, context means practically nothing to Zoe.

On the road to the temple…

Genbo is into jumping rope (or dayglo plastic) now, and he’s actually getting pretty good at it. Of course they had to do it here. Zoe first. (And no, given the tourist crowds of the day, they weren’t spoiling any of the temple’s ambiance.)

13 November 2010 Blast from the Past

I’ve been extremely busy these past couple months with a huge job. Finally pulled it off, though, and I’m back to blogging full-throttle. Well, as full-throttle as this blog ever gets, which resembles a rusty 1977 Volkswagen Beetle chugging down the Autobahn of the Internet.

This is a photo from the second time I ever went to Japan, after graduating high school. My friends Brandon (middle), Len (bottom) and I hitch-hiked throughout Japan, spending about half our time (if I recall correctly) in the northern Island in Hokkaido. Here we are holding up a hitch-hiking sign that says “Kashiwazaki (or in that direction)”