Takayama: Autumn colour and Sake

Old carved shop sign in Takayama old town

Old carved shop sign in Takayama old town

Takayama museum located in an old wooden house.

One of the many shrines dotted around the Takayama suburbs

Shop front, Takayama

Autumnal colour in front of a private house, Takayama

A simple garden spring and water barrels

Autumn colour, Takayama

A small street side shrine

More delicate wood carving

Beautiful label designs on sake bottles. Takayama old town.

Ginkgo leaves, autumn colours, Hida Kokubunji pagoda, Takayama

Ginkgo leaves, autumn colours, Hida Kokubunji pagoda, Takayama

Ginkgo leaves, autumn colours, Hida Kokubunji pagoda, Takayama

Ginkgo leaves, autumn colours, Hida Kokubunji pagoda, Takayama

Japan Photo Tour: Group Slideshow

Here are a few highlights from our first slideshow (photo review) session held last night in Takayama. Impressive results, especially from some of the street shots - very hard to get considering the number of people swarming the streets of Harajuku and we were lucky to see the dressed up kids at the shichi-no-san ceremonies in Meiji shrine. More great shots to come soon.

Harajuku girl
pic by Bob Baker

Harajuku girl
pic by Bob Baker

Shichi-no-san ceremony at Meiji shrine by Denise Tolhurst

Shichi-no-san ceremony, Meiji shrine,  pic by Denise Tolhurst

Shichi-go-san ceremony at Meiji shrine
by Kerrie Dixon

Shichi-go-san ceremony
pic by Kerrie Dixon

Urban scene, Tokyo
by Kerrie Murphy

Urban scene, Tokyo station,
by Kerrie Murphy

Street girl
pic by Marietta McGregor

Shiichi-go-san ceremony, Meiji shrine
by Marietta McGregor

Shiichi-go-san ceremony, Meiji shrine
pic by Phil Young

Burning incensepic by Phil Young

Shichi-go-san ceremony, Meiji shrine
pic by Tamara Kitson

Fish dealer, Tsukiji markets
pic by Tamara Kitson

Hikawa Maru ocean liner (floating museum)
HDR pic Robin Nichols

Trolly driver, Tsukiji market
pic by Robin Nichols

Japanese Pooches

Anyone visiting Japan can hardly fail to notice the pets out for a walk early in the morning, late evenings and at the weekend.  Much the same as in Australia other than most of the dogs here are small, cute and dressed like tiny princesses.  Here's a great pair, photographed in Yokohama City. Very cute.  Some dogs are dressed in kimono gear.  I have even seen several ninja outfits, but cutesy pink seems to be the most popular!   Canon 24-105mm lens f4.5 @ 1/2500s, ISO 800.

Understanding Light

It's not rocket science but the nature of the light falling on a subject can obviously make, or break,  any photo.  I often get asked "How can I make my photos zing", or "why are my pictures dull compared to some I have seen on the Internet"...
The simple answer is that it's usually all about the light.  Not lenses, not exposure settings and definitely not Photoshop.
We can identify the subject but we often miss what's going on with the light - what it looks like, its intensity, angle, brightness and of course, it's colour.  If you shoot early or later in the day, the light will be considerably nicer than if you shoot at midday.  Early and late afternoon light also provides longer shadows and therefore greater depth to any shot. 
Here are two classic examples.  Sake barrels stacked at the entrance to Meiji Shrine in Harajuku, Tokyo.  The first one was shot on the way into the shrine because it's almost an obligatory snap - everyone does it because they are colourful and visually interesting. However it's almost a a reflex action - the result is OK but not that exciting.  Because of the light.
On the way out of the shrine complex the light had changed - the  sun was slanting through the tree cover, illuminating the barrels unevenly - and it is this small change in the light that makes the image 100% better - not the exposure, f-stop, ISO, lens choice or Photoshop  (which in this example, did not change).
Lesson learned: take the time to look at the nature of the light. As a street or landscape photographer there's not a lot you can do to change that light, other than to wait for it to change. Sometimes it does, at other times, it doesn't.
That's the fun, and frustration of photography.

Postcard from Fuji-san

Beautiful autumnal colours processed using Jixi Pix Moku Hanga software.

Fuji-san is Japan's highest peak at 3776 metres.
Because of its beautiful symmetry it's regarded one of the country's three holy mountains and is the subject of countless paintings, poems and other images.

The five lakes region based around the town of Kawaguchigo is a very popular tourist spot for locals and overseas visitors. There are plenty of spots around Lake Kawaguchigo that present perfect views of the peak.

Mount Kachi Kachi has a short cablecar ride that gives you a great view of the sun rising over Fuji.  It's also the setting for a famous Japanese story called Kachi Kachi Yama where a racoon steals a farmer's seeds and is held to account by a friendly rabbit - I assume this little guy. Anyway, it made a bizarre point of interest with Fuji as a backdrop.

Breakfast in Japan

A typical Japanese breakfast consists of miso soup and rice.   You can add furikaki (a mix of sesame, seaweed and sometimes dried fish) to the rice to make it a bit more interesting. Of course you can also have extra seaweed strips (nori) which can be mixed into the rice.  I chose the omelette which is made by cooking beaten egg in a rectangular pan in very thin layers which are then rolled into a sort of cake. Grilled salmon, 'skimono' which I call pickle of the day (here it's pickled eggplant), pickled cabbage and grated carrot and radish finished off with a couple of salted plums. Yum.  If this does not excite, most hotels also do Western dishes as well....

Asakusa: Adding a Cool Japanese Wood Block Effect

We visited Asakusa, an older part of Tokyo, shooting in and around the huge  Senso-ji temple, complex.  Asakusa used to be a major entertainment area in Tokyo, in particular as a theater (Kabuki) district.  It was heavily damaged by US bombing raids during World War II but has been rebuilt - although suburbs like Shibuya have now surpassed Asakusa as a nighttime entertainment area.

I used a Mac plug-in called Jixi Pix to add a Japanese wood block effect to a few snaps of the area. Most filter special effects never do the image justice, but this one, called Moku Hanga, does a really good job of giving the image a specific look that fits the subject matter perfectly...

A walk through Hama Rikyu Gardens

Right across the road from Shiodome are the beautiful Hama Rikyu gardens right next to Tsukiji fish markets.  It was a very relaxing place to visit - away from the hustle of the streets and train stations back across the freeway where our hotel is situated.

Japanese newly-weds posing for the camera with the ever-present peace sign

A good visual example of the old and the new.
Hama Rinkyu gardens in Tokyo

This is such a typical classic Japanese garden scene. 
The curved bridge, the immaculately manicured pine trees and the old fashioned bug traps wrapped round some of the branches and tree trunks.
HDR image, hand held, processed using Photomatix Pro.

Mt Fuji from Central Tokyo

What a difference a day makes.  Yesterday Tokyo light was dull, grey and somewhat smoggy. Today it was clear as a bell.  Blue skies and a very crisp feel to the air.  Coming back to the hotel reception which is on the 25th floor of the Shiodome media Tower, we noticed the nice sunset. 
It took a few moments to realise what we were looking at was in fact Mt Fuji in all its glory just nestled behind the 330m Tokyo Tower.  I have never seen the city as clear as this - very nice.  This is what it looked like shot through rather dirty windows 25 floors above street level.
Tomorrow we head out to Kawaguchiko in the Five Lakes region around Fuji so maybe we'll get  both closer and clearer shots.

Classic Japan Photo Tour: Shimbashi, Tokyo

Day one of my 2014 Photo Tour of Japan.
Never stayed in this part of Tokyo before - Shimbashi is a triangle of high tech buildings housing TV, newspaper and other media companies plus of course, multi-level shopping malls and hotels in the heart of the city. Unlike any other country, Japan layers its cities with freeways, concrete, train lines and shopping.  Always the shopping...

No matter how you try to shoot a 45 storey building from the ground up, you are going to get serious perspective distortion (in this case using a 24mm lens on a full frame camera). To correct this in Photoshop would mean I'd lose the buildings to the left and right of the centre piece - and then that building would look a bit lonely - so I left it untouched

HDR shot a bit too late in the evening for a good night shot. In a city the size of Tokyo, the sky never really goes 100% black at night but it is still always better to shoot while there's some ambient light present otherwise you have to extend the exposures for so long you get a lot of digital noise and contrast problems with the highlights.  Note that even with all the hotel room lights off, I still get reflections from the thick double-glazing. Sometimes you just never win!

Amid the concrete and steel sits a small florist selling flowers to any passers by that have the time to look. 
A flower shop struck me as being a bit of a contrast with the buildings overshadowing the rest of the neighbourhood.

Christmas is here! Outside Shimbashi station, this was a multi-light extravaganza showing off a few million Chrissy lights - in fact there were so many it hurt the eyes to look for any length of time.  This is an HDR shot taken from a walkway three stories above the pedestrian mall. (Canon 14mm fisheye lens). The guy making all the noise can just be seen in front of the white electric teepee, lower left of the frame. (Canon 14mm lens).

Here I moved the tripod during the 2.5 second exposure to make the lights bleed across the frame to give a sense of energy and movement - I think this is a better result than the previous three-exposure HDR (above).

I sometimes like to photograph the empty parts of cities to emphasise the loneliness that is often created in the mass of a big development. Some areas of Shimbashi lie apparently neglected - maybe in expectation of future population growth? No shops, no offices, merely a way to get from one place to another, a giant's arcade that becomes deserted after the workers have gone home...

Commuters scurry past impossibly-retouched models advertising what appears to be the elixir of life: immortality. Oh well!  Canon EOS 5D MkIII, 14mm lens, 1/3s @ f8, ISO 400, hand held.