It’s so hard to keep a two year-old still. And, when she’s sleeping it’s usually in a dark room. Today, however, for some reason she didn’t take a nap at daycare, and hence fell asleep in my arms 30 seconds after coming home (about 10 seconds after insisting she wasn’t tired). After laying her down on the couch I brought out my tripod and a macro to take some still lifes.
Last night the kids went to bed relatively early after a day of play and Maki had the night shift, so I stayed up and fooled around taking pictures, first from my balcony and then from my preferred studio (the kitchen table).
I’m going to have to start thinking of better post titles. Today we went to the Kamada’s for dinner, and I got another little sake cup. I decided to use it as an opportunity to take more methodical shots, this time lit only by the light of a single candle. This little cup was ostensibly given to me for my past birthday, but every time I go over to his house and ostentatiously praise a piece of non-for-sale-pottery, there’s a decent chance I’ll end up taking it home, so I have to be careful to keep my mouth shut for fear of wearing out my welcome.
This first shot is a pretty good representation of how the cup actually looks (or about one centimeter of it lit by a candle, anyway). However, since the candlelight was so red, I had to yank the whitebalance in Lightroom all the way over to the blue to begin to approach reality.
The image below is much closer to how it came out of the camera. Kind of makes me think of the fiery pillars of hell, reminding me to help little old ladies across the street. I like this alternate take, it being so much more expressive than the first, cool shot. One interesting thing about this shot is that there is much more information left in the image. I didn’t have to yank the image so far over to the blue end of the spectrum that lots of the photons in the red channel got lost, so we see much more of the cup than otherwise.
And, I couldn’t resist a shot or two of the candle as well.
Getting back into some macro work. This is another cup made by my friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二) that I use for sake or scotch. That little dimple in the middle, about a millimeter or two across, is the reason I have this beautiful piece of pottery. It’s a flaw that prevented it from being sold. As my kids would say, “Thank you, mister flaw.” (No, not referring to me.)
This one really deserve to be seen full size
The other day the Kamadas came over for a little new year’s get-together, which involved hanging around at our house for a while and then going out for some great yaki-niku, where you grill your own meat at the table and drink lots of draft beer. The owner is a fan of Kamada-san’s pottery, which I’ve blogged about in the past, and he treated us like kings, especially because Kamada-san brought him a little present at my suggestion.
The photo below shows them playing something very interesting. Japanese people are very big on various forms of karuta, or cards. The most widespread version is the Hyakunin-Isshu, which was originally an anthology of 100 poems compiled in the 12th century.These were then assembled into a deck of cards, with each card containing a single poem in calligraphic form. The game is that two or more people will sit in front of the spread-out deck, while another person reads the poems at random. The contestants then have to find the appropriate card and pick it up before their opponent does. This is actually a very big “sport” in Japan, with national championships, ranks, and the level of obsession Japanese people pour into just about everything. The “pros” only have to hear one or two syllables before they recognize which poem is being read, and their hand shoots out unbelievably fast. Here is one gorgeous video showing people dressed up in the ceremonial garb of the 12th century playing the game at Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto (a ritual carried out at the beginning of each new year), and here is a national news report about the national championships, with some great video showing how fast the pros are. Coincidentally, this is at the shrine where Genbo and Zoe go to daycare.
Anyway, Genbo got a deck of karuta for new year’s from his Japanese grandparents, although these don’t have the Hyakunin-Issue poems on them, but rather kotowaza, or Japanese proverbs. Being a confucian country, Japanese people are big at sprinkling proverbs into conversation. They learn them very early—five years old, in fact. Genbo already has his proverb cards memorized, and Zoe isn’t actually half bad either.
Here are a few more pics from the shrine I mentioned in yesterday’s post. As you can see, it was a place of pristine natural beauty.
As photographers in Japan soon learn, judicious cropping goes a long way.
And, of course, some leaves:
A few days ago Jeffrey and I went to go photograph Himukai shrine (日向神社) before the autumn leaves all fell. It was a small, unobtrusive and unpretentious shrine tucked into the foothils surrounding Kyoto, and I liked it a lot. Here are just a few pictures from the trip.
(Again I find that no matter how many lenses I take anywhere, the photos I end up using are invariably the ones taken with the Zeiss 100.)
There was a little sub-shrine off to the side with a wonderfully rotting torii, or gate marking off the sacred area. I think we spent more time photographing this than everything else.
These last two photos are meant to be facing each other in a diptych. I arranged them that way in the hopes of bringing them to my photography group, which met today, but Genbo with the flu and some pesky patients at the hospital conspired to prevent that. Guess I’ll have to try again in two months.
So, after I went to my photography teacher’s place with a single pottery macro and he told me to reshoot it as a nature-inspired tryptic, this is what I came up with. I won’t bother posting a thumbnail here, since the image is so long. Click on that link and then expand the browser window to see the whole thing.
The title of the piece is 山嵐, or “Mountain Storm,” although it sounds more dramatic in Japanese. Each piece in the tryptic will be printed on A3 size paper, which is 16.5 inches (420 mm) across. The length of the pottery shard (graciously given by my friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二)) pictured in all three frames is smaller than the width of my thumbnail.
I can’t wait to see them hanging on the wall along with everybody else’s pieces!
One challenge I had while shooting is that a very slight change in angle of the light (from an LED flashlight) completely changed the characteristics of the image, since the glaze has all different kinds of metallic crystals, reflections from which are very sensitive to changes in direction of light source.
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.)
I’ve got not one but two concerts tomorrow, so for good luck I think I’ll post some more shakuhachi macros to follow up on my previous post.
As I mentioned before, the friend of my teacher’s who did this maki-e is the official artisan for the imperial household, the official symbol of which is the chrysanthemum. Apparently he can use the chrysanthemum motif for other things as well, as long as it doesn’t have the same number of petals as the imperial one, which is sometimes 14 and sometimes 16.
I knew this shakuhachi from before it got the gold leaf; I had tried to play it and completely failed. (This is a very “high octane” flute–it will perform for you, but you gotta have the breath or it won’t even give you as much sound as a beginner instrument). When I first saw it with the maki-e, I thought it didn’t need it, but now that I’m used to it I just love it.
Bamboo starts out pale yellow and gets darker with age. This dark color is, in official shakuhachi parlance, called “really frickin’ old.”
One of the shakuhachis I am most fortunate to own is called Jo-un (恕雲), made by Tomomasa Gakudo (岳童友正) early in the 20th century. The bamboo itself, however, is clearly much older. The thing plays like a monster. No other shakuhachi I have ever played has the same tone. One friend and a fan of my teacher Taniguchi-sensei was the official maki-e (gold leaf art) artisan of the imperial family, and he decorated a few flutes for my teacher. Jo-un is one.
I took these macros with paired 27.5 mm extension tubes and a 1.4 teleconverter attached to my ZF 100/2. To give you an idea of the size, the width of each of these is less than my thumbnail. To have brushed on many successive layers of gold leaf in such a scale and with such precision boggles the mind.
I should really write an explanation of what the characters written in gold leaf mean, their history, etc., but I’m tired, I’ve had my nightly nip of scotch already, and tomorrow’s a long day.
Here are a few more that didn’t make it into yesterday’s post because they showed no “naked” earth.
I’ve talked about my potter friend Koji Kamada (鎌田幸二) twice before. This time I asked him for some fragments of broken pieces to play around with and he was nice enough to oblige.
These shots were taken with my ZF 100/2 macro lens, my very crappy tripod (I used a 5 second timer, on the theory that all the wobbles from pressing the button would have extinguished by 5 seconds after pushing the shutter), my SB-900 flash, and a PK-13 extension tube. This 27.5 mm ring is just an empty tube that fits between the lens and the camera. Working on the same principle that when you move a magnifying glass farther away what’s in it gets bigger, this little ring can magnify images by a lot. And, since it’s just empty space in there, there is no loss of image quality. What you do lose is light, and the ability to focus very far away, but both of these are negligible for table-top macro photography.
Since I used a macro lens with an extension ring, what you are seeing are very, very close-up images of these fragments. Unfortunately my Nikon D90 does not glean any photographic information from the lens, but these were all taken between f11 and f16. Even at these small apertures, the depth of field is still incredibly small at this short distance.
Finally, in this series the one that really benefits from clicking to enlarge is the second one, since its horizontal orientation means that it gets shrunk by a lot to fit into the space. And, this is the one that best exposes the boundary between stone and glass (which is really what the glaze is).
