I’ve written before (most recently here) about high dynamic range (HDR) photography, where you compensate for the camera’s inability to render detail in light and dark areas simultaneously by combining multiple photographs of the same subject. Well, it turns out the technique brings a lot to my iPhone, as well. There is a built-in function to take HDR images, but the output isn’t nearly as good, I’ve found, as when you use a little app called Pro HDR.

Here is a screen grab of it in action. You let it take one light exposure and one dark, then combine them as so. You can even hand-hold, and as long as you aren’t too unsteady it merges the images without lots of artifacts.

“Magic Happening Now”
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Here is the result. I chose to include the sun in the image, which inherently causes lots of flare and desaturation, but even with this the shot looks pretty good. It looks much better than would have been possible with a single exposure alone in these conditions.

Temple with Cranes
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Here is another shot of the same subject. Notice the details in the highlights and the shadows without the end result looking overly fake (although you can tweak it for that effect if you wish).

Pretty Amazing for a Camera Phone
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Now here are a couple old photos taken with the program. First, a thimble-full of sake before drinking it.

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And, someone’s illegally parked bike tossed unceremoniously into the bushes. Great quality photo for how dark it was.

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There have been some cell phone photos I’ve been wanting to share, but I’m slightly hesitant to put measly cell photos up here. But, I now have a critical mass, so here goes.

My grocery store believes in really fresh fish (or at least the illusion thereof, since I’m sure this sucker was frozen, too)
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She’s a natural (too bad her shakuhachi lessons begin next week)
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Japanese mothers are rightly famous for their ornate bento, or lunch boxes, and I quail at the thought of competing on a daily basis. Genbo and Zoe only have bento once a month, though, so on those days I’m willing to pull out all the stops. Here is one from last week:

三食ご飯 (“Three-Colored Rice”)
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That’s a bed of rice covered by scrambled eggs (with milk, cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla extract, since we had extra French Toast batter left over from breakfast), mackerel (chopped and simmered for about an hour in soy sauce, fish/seaweed stock, mirin, sugar, sake, more sugar, and some more soy sauce), and spinach (flavored with soy sauce and mirin), all topped with chikuwa (compressed fish product) branded with Anpanman characters. Phew.

“Mom”
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Finally, this is a shot I took last night after a long day of work (hey, it happens sometimes). The location is my local watering hole, 母の一味 (“Tastes Like Mom’s”). This is the owner of the establishment, whom everybody calls, surprisingly enough, “Mom” (perfectly natural in a Japanese context). I was testing out my new Griffin Clarifi, an iPhone case with a built-in close-up lens. Works pretty good (also used for the bento picture above).

It’s very good to be back home. We were away for three weeks, the last two of which was just the kids and me, so a large part of being glad at being home is relief that I am no longer solely responsible for their care, feeding, and entertainment. Even the flight home, which was 11 hours from San Francisco to Narita, a 3 hour layover, then another hour to Osaka, was not nearly as bad as it could have been. They behaved pretty well. Not all of it was the sweetness and light you see here, but it was still fine.

Zoe consented to a seatbelt for landing only if she could share with Genbo
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I didn’t get much of a chance to blog, but I do have a bunch of great photos that I will be putting up from now on.

Here are two shots representing today. I spent it, like I do all Saturdays, with Genbo and Zoe (since Maki works on Saturday, her days off being Wednesday and Sunday). This is just a shot of them at the front of the train. I love Genbo’s protective arm around his sister.

Here is my new macro setup. You can see the ultra-sophisticated use of the sandbag instead of the tripod. Yes, this is primarily because I don’t have a real tripod, but also because in this case a sandbag really is the best way to go. I have two extension rings and a teleconverter attached to my lens, which means one long piece of equipment including four joints. This means that it should be supported all along its length to prevent sagging, and the best way to do that is a sandbag.

I was shooting some abstract macros of my friend Kamada-san’s work. Tomorrow the guy who leads my photo group and I will work on them, deciding what to print for a group show. I’m pretty happy with what I got, and I’ll post what we decide on later. (Here are the shots I am going to bring tomorrow. Somehow we’ll figure out how to arrange them into a triptych. I was thinking about portraying them as a mountain with clouds, but they also look a lot like a breaking wave to me as well. There’s also a cool shot in that gallery that shows me holding the shard, so you get an idea of scale.)

Two days ago I met with my photographers group, which is planning for a group exhibition in a couple weeks. I brought a few candidate photos, and the leader of the group selected a macro of my friend Kamada-san’s pottery for me to present. Only, he told me to make it into a tryptic, or three-part piece. So, I’m going to reshoot it in the next few days and see what I can come up with. But doing a coherent three part piece of an abstract macro is hard. Should be interesting, though.

Here are some people arranging some pieces of another tryptic, this time of Kabuki actors. They are using a projector to show the computer screen on the wall so everyone can participate. The guy who took these photos brought in about 50 different shots to select among, and they selected a combination that I suggested, which was significantly ego-stroking to leave me smiling for a few minutes. Only, I suggested it with the two outer faces looking inward, whereas the sensei (the back of whose head is front and center here) immediately recognized that it would be better with them facing outward. And, of course he was right. His own contribution to the exhibit was tailored, I think, to be good but subdued enough not to take all the attention from everybody else’s work.

One of Genbo’s most loved activities is throwing rocks into bodies of water. I don’t know if all children love this as much as he does, but ever since he could throw this has been a favorite.

His form can use some work
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This is the canal that goes from lake Biwa from where we are all the way down (I think) to Osaka Bay. Here we are near our old house in Fushimi, Kyoto, when we went down there to see our friends the Kamadas.

Looking for just the right stone
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Buddhist monk reading Heidegger’s Phenomenology of the Spirit on the train
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(I only wish you could read the title in the photo, although it’s in Japanese, so (most of) you would have had to take my word for it anyway.)

I haven’t blogged recently because Genbo and Zoe have had an unexpected week-long vacation from daycare thanks to the un-kosher flu and concomitant predictable Japanese over-response. It’s actually been a lot easier looking after both of them for a week than I expected, which probably says a lot more about their (relatively) increasing growth and maturity than mine own.

Today Zoe and I ended up waiting for a train together, since Genbo was off with his mom (who had the day off from work). I sat down on one end of a three-seat bench at the station, and she, to demonstrate her growing independence as a newly-minted two-year old, sat down at the opposite end. She got a little bit more than she bargained for, however, because this old guy with a great, weathered face sat down between us. She was a trooper, though, and despite obvious misgiving held her ground against the intruder.

“Maybe I shoulda stayed with daddy….”
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He was actually an interesting guy, though. Started up a conversation with me in a casual, friendly way that I didn’t expect from someone of his generation. It turned out he has traveled extensively in Peru and other parts of South America, which explained it.

“Daddy seems to think he’s OK, but I better keep my finger in my mouth just in case.”
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