At a family reunion in July, I spent some time around a campfire. I hadn’t really photographed fire before now, at least not with any degree of intentionality. I explored a variety of different angles, shutter speeds, and focal lengths as I photographed this constantly moving and changing subject. Because this is an exploration of a singular thing, my normal rules of culling don’t apply. The full gallery is found here.
Our tenth day in Japan has us leaving Hiroshima behind, along with Honshu (the main island of Japan), and travelling by plane to the island of Okinawa. We didn’t do much our first day in Okinawa, and were disappointed with how windy and cool it was – we were hoping for warmer weather! The photo gallery is now live.
Our ninth day in Japan was our final day in Hiroshima, and our hosts James and Miko took us out for a fun day in the town of Kurashiki, a traditional Japanese town that’s been kept fairly historical over the years. This gallery wasn’t nearly as big as the last one, so it was easier to get through and is now live.
In the never-ending quest to finish my Japan vacation photos, I’ve managed to get though another day’s worth of images. Our 8th day in Japan was our first full day in Hiroshima. We spent the morning on the island of Miyajima, the afternoon at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and the evening out for dinner with our friend James and his girlfriend Miko. It was a busy day!
Our seventh day in Japan was also our last day in Kyoto, so we took the opportunity to see some last sights before packing up and leaving for Hiroshima – and the gallery is now online. We didn’t do much on our first day in Hiroshima, but we did have an “exciting” dining experience – be sure to check out the video. 😉
That’s right, here I am posting photos from a trip I’ve been back from for over well over a month (pushing two). I fell into the same trap as Hawaii 2006: I took so many photos that editing them is a major undertaking, something I have trouble making time for when I’m not on vacation. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a psychological element to it as well – I psyche myself out every time I sit down to edit them because it’s such a big undertaking. Having them grouped by day certainly helps though – if they were in one giant blob it would be much harder to tackle. At any rate, day six photos are now published on my photo site.
Since picking up the Nikon D300 a few months back, I’ve been constantly amazed at how well it functions, and how superb the images look – specifically ISO performance. I’m generally not the type of person that needs my choices validated by another person, but when it comes to DSLRs I still have much to learn. I was also initially on the fence about whether or not the D300 would be worth it because the D200 was an extremely impressive camera. In fact, more than one person told me that I should keep shooting with my D200…so I was pleased to see Phil Askey from dpreview.com come to this conclusion about the D300:
“My biggest problem writing this conclusion has been picking out the D300’s weak points. The usefulness of Live View would certainly be improved with an articulating LCD monitor (although I’m sure Nikon would argue that this could compromise the integrity of the body), auto white-balance is poor in artificial light (although this isn’t anything unique to the D300) and there’s still no true mirror lock-up feature. But really, these few niggles are really the only things we could pick out as criticism. There is price, but sometimes the best products demand a premium and the D300 is no exception. Nikon’s biggest problem now will be bettering the D300; it raises the bar to a new high, and represents the state of the art despite strong competition from the likes of Canon, Sony and Olympus. There’s simply no better semi-professional digital SLR on the market.”
I’m post this here on my personal blog rather than Digital Home Thoughts because I don’t want to upset those Canon people. 😉
[The following is re-published from Digital Home Thoughts – if you’re going to link to this, please link there instead – thank you!]
I’m working on my first book project – one where I’m creating a vacation scrapbook on 13″ x 11″ pages inside FotoFusion and will export the JPEGs then get them printed up as full-bleed pages in a Blurb hardcover book. This is my first attempt at this type of a project, but I have high hopes it will turn out really nicely.
One challenge I had was trying to scan the little pieces of paper we brought back that weren’t perfectly rectangular, or things I wanted to layer over each other – plane tickets, train tickets, etc. When I scanned them, it was typically off-white on off-white (the background of my scanner). Even using Photoshop Elements’ Magic Extractor, I was unable to properly extract the objects – I tried tweaking the settings, tried masking it myself with the magic wand, etc. Nothing worked because the background colour of my scanner lid was just too close to the colour of my objects. I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish the visual design I wanted. Continue reading Green-Screen Scanning Makes For Easier Object Extraction
Our fifth day in Japan was a busy one – we did our first full-day tour, which had six stops, including Nijo Castle, Kinkakuji Temple (also known as the Golden Pavilion), Kyoto Imperial Palace, Todai-ji temple, Deer Park, and the Kasuga Taisha Shinto Shrine. Many pictures were taken, and there’s a video showing several of the sites as well.
On a photographic note, I converted a few more of the photos in this set to a high-contrast black and white…I like the way they look, but I’m still trying to hone my own type of B&W look for post-processing.
(I’m writing this sitting on the floor of the Vancouver airport…back in Canada! Almost home…so sleepy.)
Guess who got inked in Okinawa? Check out the pictures (with a video)…
