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Me
photo and processing by Stéphane Barbery
As I've mentioned recently, I'm trying to get more skillful with formal portraiture, and to that end yesterday I had another practice session with fellow Kyoto resident Stéphane Barbery.
友達と一緒のポートレート撮影の練習、第二回目。前回と比べて、今回は道具は兆レーバルアっプしましたけれども、能力はまだまだです。 上は友達に撮ってもらった今回の僕です。
We had a ton of new lighting equipment but very little experience on how to use it, so our main goal was to just try all kinds of lighting setups to see what worked and what didn't work. I'll write more on that later.
We also tried to see what worked on the human level... there's so much more behind a good result than technical skill... you have to have/create a certain connection between the one shooting and the one being shot. We've known each other for years, but it's a very different thing to put a camera in between, so in one sense we were starting from scratch.
But there's clear progress from the first time we did this, back in June. To revisit that shoot, here's the lead photo from “Trying a Little Formal Portraiture, Round 1: Stéphane Barbery Shoots Me”:
Nikon D4 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/800 sec, f/1.4, ISO 400 — image data
From Round One
前回の僕、三ヶ月前
photo and processing by Stéphane Barbery
Maybe it helps that this time I have a shave and a shirt with a collar (a ¥790 collared version of the Uniqlo Dry T), but I think it also represents progress in lighting, in Stéphane's skill behind the camera, and in my comfort in front of it. Maybe my max cliché photo shoot helped in that regard.
I'm happy to be able to show one of the shots I took:
Stéphane Barbery
photo by me, processed by Stéphane
As of this morning, the computer that I do all my photo stuff on is currently in the shop for repairs so I don't have access to the photos, which is one reason I'm posting Stéphane's copies. Another reason is to continue progress in learning to let go of my self-image hangups by showing someone else's photographic post-processing, especially someone else who artistic sense sometimes differs from mine.
Along those lines, here's a shot he took of me that we have different feelings on:
photo and processing by Stéphane Barbery
上の写真はどう思いますか？僕は好きじゃない、何となくいや（身の毛のよだつような気持ち）。友達があの写真好き。
Something about it is downright creepy to me, as if the caption should be “Your children were absolutely delicious!”, but it's one of a small group he picked as the best of the whole day, so I dunno. What do you think?
I think these shots from yesterday were taken with the unparalleled Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5; I'll add data under the photos once I get my laptop back and can check the details.
To be continued...
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Well, this is annoying... my MacBook keyboard has started to go flaky, with several keys no longer working... the “” key, the “” key, and the “” key. Don't see them? Dooh! I can't type them, silly! 🙂
One of the regrettable side effects of Apple's exceedingly-compact, dense designs is that repair/replacement of parts can be “challenging”, to phrase it kindly, and the keyboard is a good example: a key is “repaired” by disassembling almost the entire main body and replacing the whole keyboard assembly.
I've got the “AppleCare” extended warranty so I can get it fixed plenty easily, nevertheless still a hassle, especially since the problem appeared at the start of a three-day weekend. (Monday is the “Respect for the Aged” holiday in Japan.) The day after that, I'll take the laptop to the repair place and hope it's something they can do on site, knowing I'll probably lose the laptop for a week or more. 🙁
So, we'll probably see zero posts on my blog for a while, except that perhaps this will be motivation for me to finally clean my office desk to the point that I can access my MacPro (my desktop Mac). These days, I normally do all my work with my laptop while reclining in a big soft La-Z-Boy, so my desk has grown to be a vast wasteland of random debris piled in layers over time. If I clean, I'll be astonished if I don't find a fossil or two.
I will soothe the pain this evening by (yet again) drowning myself in beef and beer at the great BBQ/Beer garden feast at the hotel next to the (oddly-named) Qanat Mall, as I've written of several times.
PS: if my prose on this post seems a bit stilted this time, it's owing to the fact that I can't type the letter “” (again, I can't type it!), so I've had to find alternative ways to phrase things. Which letter? That's for the reader to decipher. 🙂 Here's a hint: this post has every letter except the one I can't type.
Here's another hint: to write this post while avoiding the letter that my keyboard rejects, I had to often refer to my thesars.
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Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lots Going On
hard to know where to focus
The fall colors are probably already starting to appear in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but we won't begin to see them in Kyoto for another six weeks, so I'm dipping into the archives for a preview.
These shots are from a trip to south-western Kyoto's Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) last November. As the proximity-search feature of my blog shows, I've posted plenty from this area in the past, including three posts with photos from this particular trip:
More Fall Foliage From the Yoshiminedera Temple
A Few Colorful Kyoto Desktop Backgrounds from November
So, there's nothing new here, but I like pretty pictures, so here we go...
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
View
from the parking lot
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 450 — map & image data — nearby photos
Paul Barr
being Paul Barr
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 4500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Camo Tree
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
So Uniform It Hurts
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Ying and Yang
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Things Are Looking Up
Nikon D700 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Abstract
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 — 1/1600 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lightpost
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my book
Considering that I wrote “Mastering Regular Expressions”, a generally well received book about computer-science pattern-matching technology, I thought I was quite familiar with them, but I've recently become aware of a dark side I'd not known about.
僕が書いた本（「詳説 正規表現」の英語版）は 岡村靖幸の新曲「ぶーしゃか」のビデオに見られます。 曲はめっちゃへん... ぼくの本とどんな関係かな。 (-: へんな曲ですが、覚えやすいメロディーです。
Like any technology, they're not everyone's cup of tea, of course, but it seems that overexposure can cause severe..... something.... I'm not quite sure how to explain it, so as evidence I'll just present Yasuyuki Okamura's music video for his song “Buu shaka”.
(Note: the song probably makes more sense if you don't understand Japanese.)
Catchy tune, though.
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Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 28mm — 1/320 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Foreboding
looking on while some parts of Kyoto get drenched
large scrollable version below, or click through
Well, I don't mean to make this blog all about clouds, despite my prior post showing a raincloud panorama, just like this one, but I guess that's Kyoto's weather of late. (It's also on my list to follow up on “Pregnant Cloud Over Kyoto” with a sequence of that cloud dumping its water.)
Anyway, this evening I went to the last day of the all-you-can-feast Beer/BBQ before they shut down forever, more or less repeating the performance chronicled in last week's “Diary of Gluttonous Excess: Last Night’s Visit to the Kyoto Avanshell BBQ Beer Garden”.
It turns out, though, that they've pushed back the closing by a week, until Monday the 17th, so I'll go again next Sunday. The price drops from ¥3,500 to ¥2,500, making a stellar value 29% better.
Unless you're lucky enough to get a seat under the awning, you're exposed to the possibility of rain, and this evening it looked like we might get a squall coming through. Half an hour in, I snapped a quick 200° 11-photo panorama, with the far right edge aiming north, and south being fairly far to the left.
In the large version you get when you click through, to the south (leftish-edge) you can see Kyoto Tower, and immediately behind it an opaque rain curtain. You can also see rain in various places in the mountains.
or click through to a 16,000-pixel-wide version
However, we dodged a bullet; and it didn't start raining until not long after we left. Much yumminess was had by all.