Thanks to Jeffrey for the photos.

Ready for take-off
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Reaching cruising altitude
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Now above the clouds
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…and enjoying some turbulence
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Some well-earned R&R for the ground-crew
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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.

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More beautiful than any three artfully placed trees
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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.

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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.

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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.

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On the road to the temple…

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Hamming it up
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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.)

Getting ready…
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Success!
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FINALLY Genbo’s turn…
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At least it’s not the peace sign…
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The last post was extremely Japanese in nature, so this one will provide a good contrast. Tonight for dinner we went down to the Sausalito Yacht Club for dinner. The place sounds decidedly fancier than it is; dinner was a BBQ out on the deck overlooking San Francisco Bay. It was perfect, though, for precisely that reason.

Genbo looking at the ocean

Me hanging dangerously over railing to get shot of Genbo looking at ocean from ocean's perspective

If this is the Yacht Club, are those the yachts?

Wolfing down obligatory hamburgers and hotdogs

Not at all different from the Japan....really

Looking out towards Alcatraz and San Francisco as the ferry comes in

Interesting boat catching nice light

Priceless expression

OK, there are still a few blossoms on the cherry trees, so this post is not technically late. I returned to the exact place pictured in the first shot of this post with a mission to take some non-boring sakura pics. Since I wanted to use my new neutral density (ND) filters, however, I knew I wanted to do something with running water. These are basically just darkened glass you put in front of the lens to allow you to keep the shutter open for longer, thus capturing motion, without blowing everything out. The trick, as I quickly learned, is to find something moving in close juxtaposition with something not.

After many, many false starts, I finally settled on this one rock in the stream with some blossoms stuck to it. I had to take off my shoes and bring my tripod down into the stream to get the right perspective, but it was worth it. Not only was I able to arouse some levity among the passers-by, but I also got some very nice shots. (At first the water was extremely cold, but I just lost all sensation in my feet after a few minutes, which is good, because the rocks were sharp, too.)

These first two shots are some of my favorite that I’ve ever taken. I love how the ND filters let me keep the shutter open long enough to make the water all silky, while still capturing the rock-stranded blossoms in perfect clarity. The whisps of light you see are reflections on the water’s surface.

This first one, especially, deserves to be clicked on to see at full size.

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Here I was fortunate enough to be in a position to capture a bunch of blossoms blown into the stream by a particularly fierce gust of wind.

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…Or not. I cannot tell a lie.

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I don’t usually get much culture beyond poopy diapers and Thomas the Tank Engine, so sometimes it’s refreshing to go into Kyoto and indulge myself. As I had last year, this year I went to my favorite shakuhachi-busking corner at Kiyamachi below Sanjo, right beside a babbling brook and under a bunch of cherry blossoms, to play for everyone and hopefully make some change. That last is of course ancillary to the whole enterprise, but adds an element of fun and chance human interaction.

I played just to the left of where you can see in this photo. Lots of people stopped on this bridge to watch me play.

The scene
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These next three photos were taken by my friend Jeffrey, who dropped by with his son Anthony to watch and take photos before going to a photography exhibit (shown below).

Reminder to self: Iron shirt first next time
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One of my favorite things about doing this is talking to people. This time I met three old ladies, in their 60′s or 70′s. At first they stopped and listened for a few moments, then each gave me a 1000 yen (about 10 dollars) before moving on. This was remarkable for its generosity, and I gave them a bow-while-playing. A while later they came back again, and started requesting certain songs. At this point it was obvious that, although they spoke decent Japanese, they were definitely from somewhere else. I asked and they said they were from Korea. So, I played them the two Korean folk songs that I know by heart. It was very nice, although the entire experience was tinged by the knowledge that most likely the only reason we could communicate at all was because they had grown up in Japanese-occupied Korea, and had been forced to learn the language at school.

Just as I was putting my flute away an elderly Japanese couple approached and started talking to me. The lady said that she really liked shakuhachi, so I took my flute out again and began to play a simple song. At his wife’s urging, the husband began to sing along with me. It was a nice little impromptu duet, and I was glad to have Jeffrey there to capture the moment. Afterward, as I was packing up again, I learned that the lady likes exactly the kind of classical shakuhachi music I specialize in, which is pretty remarkable. It’s the kind of esoteric genre that only those who actually play it make an effort to listen to. (All the songs I play in situations like this street performance are purely shakuhachi arrangements of well-known, 20th century songs.)

First and last joint performance
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After that we all went to a photography exhibit by Sawa Kenji (佐和賢爾), a Buddhist priest and my photography teacher (although that implies a more formal relationship than actually exists). I had seen one of the photographs before, laid out on the floor of his temple, so I had lured Jeffrey out with the promise of an incredible show, and he wasn’t disappointed. I’ll let the photographs below speak for themselves, but in case it’s hard to tell each scene is covered in three or four exposures, which are combined to make unified images. We got there at the very end of the last day, and I just happened to have my flutes with me, so I gave a short impromptu concert there for him and everybody else before they turned on the lights and started taking the photographs down. It was a nice moment.

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I’ve blogged often about my friend Kamada Koji (鎌田幸二), who has been kind enough to devote decades of his life to becoming a master potter in the Tenmoku (天目) style just so that I could take macros of his stuff. Last week he held a yearly show at Takashimaya, one of the fancier Japanese department stores. I would have loved to bring my tripod, kick everybody out, and adjust the light to my specifications, but any picture-taking at all is ordinarily forbidden. I had his special permission, but still felt it was a good idea to be as discreet and fast as possible.

Kamada-san pointing center, with his wife Kazumi
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Tea powder holder with case
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Vase with cherry blossom branch
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Another tea powder holder with case
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Small vase with flower
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It’s exceedingly difficult to capture the nuances of nearly all his glazes, but this particular one most of all, because in real life the colors are not only extremely subtle, but they shift mercurially (almost literally because they are metallic crystals) with small changes in light.

Tea bowl
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Detail
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This alleyway leading to a fine Kyoto dining establishment is quintessentially Kyoto. Or, rather, is the image the Kyoto often seeks to brand itself with, even though alleyways like this are actually fairly rare. Either way, it’s nice.

They were doing some construction on the bark-covered walls as I went to the camera store, and by the time I passed by on the way back with my new lens they were done.

“Brand-spanking new, but built to look old”
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“Open for business”
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I like the wood used on this post, although I have no idea how they got it to look that way.

Extremely well-trained termites?
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