The photo above is pretty much exactly the kind of shot I had in mind when I first thought to venture out into the crowds at Kyoto's Gion Matsuri festival, and seems to be what the Nikkor 300mm f/2 was made for. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people were milling about, but as far as the lens was concerned, at that moment there were only two people on earth.

I bet they felt the same.

Just compare it to a shot taken a few seconds later at f/11...

Back to the isolating effects of f/2...

I've [...]

Today was the biggest day of Kyoto's biggest annual festival, Gion Matsuri. I opted out of the main event, a sun-grilled parade of the big wooden floats seen in an earlier post, but I did attend an interesting event in the late afternoon when it was cooler, shinkousai. I'll post more photos another day...

Continued here...

So I went again to the massive crowds at Kyoto's largest annual festival, Gion Matsuri as I did on the first night and second night. This time I didn't screw up the camera settings so things went better. I had intended to publish these few photos last night, but I ended up being too tired, so here they are the next day.

As always, my lens brought out smiles and curiosity, and various people and groups would pose for photos...

I wish I would have known of this "huge lens" effect on people when I was young and single, because [...]

So, as I wrote yesterday, I screwed up my camera settings and took all yesterday's photos at the smallest, lowest-quality JPEG settings, which leaves little room to correct white balance and exposure in Lightroom. I did much better the first day.

I'll probably try one more time tonight, but for what it's worth, here are some of the shots from last night, recovered as best I could, presented for the story they tell more than for their photographic qualities...

This worker (manning a large set of trash cans) chatted with me a bit about my lens, and I told him [...]

So I went out to the second (of three) Gion Festival festival-in-the-streets evenings as I did yesterday, but this time I neglected to adjust the camera settings, and I left them at what Anthony uses for his stop-motion Lego play. That means that instead of shooting raw as I normally do, which allows for the highest quality results, I ended up shooting in the smallest, lowest-quality JPEGs the camera could do. What a huge mistake.

It's all the more depressing because I must have given my contact info to at least a dozen people, to contact me for copies of [...]