Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 45 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
This Is Not Art
It's photography

The caption is just a silly reference to the “art” vs. “photography” discussion in my recent post about HDR. When I first looked this picture, I wondered why it was a blurry – it seemed mosaiced or pixelated, as if it hadn't been fully loaded from disk before display – and I waited for it to finish loading and to “snap” into focus. I eventually realized that it wasn't pixelated, but rather, it just had a lot of water drops that you (or, at least, I) don't notice at first.

It's a lotus flower. [UPDATE: Peter Barnes of Barnes Botany left a comment on a followup post indicating that this flower is a waterlily, not a lotus. Oops!]

I took the shot handheld, on a cloudy, gloomy day, leaning precariously over a water-lily pond, so the full-size version is not as crisply focused as it could be, but it's good enough.

In any case, even though I know what it is, it still has a strong “processed” feeling to it, as if it been run through a few Photoshop filters. Hence, the caption.

I did crop it a bit... here's the full frame:

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 45 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/6.3, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos

Last month, we visited a lotus garden in Shiga (about 45 minutes away by car) that I'll write more about another time. Fumie learned about the garden on the blog of a fellow fan of Kousuke Atari, a pop singer we've seen in concert many times. My first time was in Miyajima, and my seventh (I think... I've lost count) was this evening, here in Kyoto, where he was backed by the Kyoto Symphony Orchestra.

During the intermission, a lady came up to us and introduced herself. She's the lady with the blog, and had been exchanging mail with Fumie, but they'd never met. So, now we've met the lotus lady. This reminded me that I'd not posted anything from that trip, so having arrived home from the concert, here we are with a post.

It was interesting how she could find us among the thousand or so people at the concert (it was a small venue). In the seven Kousuke Atari concerts I've been to, big and small, I once met a guy from Sweden, whose wife had dragged him along. Other than that, I've never noticed another “doesn't look Japanese” person, so I'm probably pretty easy to pick out of the crowd. 🙂

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 55 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/8, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos