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Continuing from this weekend's Setsubun Festival at the Heian Shrine in Kyoto, with nasty demons representing the ills of the past year, being banished in the hope of a better year to come...
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Bamboo Sprig
just an excuse to get the shrine building out of focus in the background
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Waiting
for the event to begin
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Door
slightly misleading
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Cherry
will be magnificent in about two months
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Eaves Above Me
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Evil Spirits Make Their Appearance
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Richly Appointed
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Menacing the Crowd
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Celebration of Victory
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Goading Dance
“tee-hee-hee, it's great to be an evil demon lording over powerless humanity”
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Enter the Cavalry
beans a flyin'
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Smack
right in the kisser
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Thwarted Counter Attack
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On the Run
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Nah, None of That
Driving away demons with relaxed nonchalance
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Banished for Good
at least until next year
I captioned the third picture with “Door, slightly misleading” because, as you can see in the final photo, what look like door handles are really brackets to hold a huge brace.
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Burning Hot Lyrics
chanting at part of the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine
Kyoto, Japan
Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine, so I walked over to snap some pictures. I'll post and write more another day, but today just a few photos. (For an introduction to the event, see my “Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons” post from four years ago.)
The picture above is from the bonfire event, described in my “Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine” post. A line of priests was chanting as others threw bundles of sticks with wishes written on them (the wishes then going up with the smoke to the heavens, or something like that).
I'm surprised in the photo above how much the background is still out of focus at f/11. The flames were quite angry....
I processed these photos with Lightroom 4 and its new render engine, and I notice that the flames retain much more of their true orange color. This is wonderful, as it always bothered me how bright, intense colors got washed out toward white, leaving the flames in the intense-burn post more yellow than orange. I'll have to try processing them in Lr3 as well, to confirm the better result is not all due to a different camera or better exposure.
Other aspects of the festival included a bunch of nasty demons who ended up getting driven out of the place by bean-throwing dignitaries...
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Demon
representing the ills of the previous year
... and then bringing in good fortune by more bean throwing, but this time as packets one could catch and bring home (as described in my “Setsubun Mamemaki: Throwing of the Beans” post).
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Spreading Good Fortune
one pack of beans at a time
The hyper-made-up world of the geiko (Kyoto's geisha) is not really my thing, but I loved the smile on the one in the photo above.... she looked like she was having a total blast, and that made it all the more fun.
I found myself wanting a pack of beans to bring home for Anthony (and maybe bring home some good fortune for myself), but gave up on the idea because I didn't want to wade too deeply into the crowd with my big lens. But I was surprised not once, but three times as folks going by gave me a pack. How wonderful. We had them this evening after dinner.
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Wow, time flies... now that there's a Lightroom 4 beta out, I'm really ramping up the work to upgrade my Lightroom plugins appropriately, and have barely had time to come up for air, and so I was a bit surprised when I noticed today that it's been five days since my previous post. So, here's the part-two follow-on to “Traditional Japanese Archery: More Ladies, Part 1”.
I'll start out with the original photo from which the previous post's “Tall Tale” lead photo was derived...
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The Original
( sort of )
In that “Tall Tale” photo I had fun stitching together two unrelated shots, but in the end, even after all that work, I think I like the original better... the bow somehow seems even larger and more impressive. I did go ahead and remove a rope from the background, though, as I did for the “Tall Tale” the other day.
More images of the ladies...
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#2132
the final archer
( I've got to learn that focusing on something other than the eyes doesn't usually work out well )
As I explained earlier in “Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer’s Shot”, the main event of the day was for ranked archers who had become legal adults (20 years old) in the previous year, and the lady above was the 2,132nd and final among them. This was followed by some archery instructors, then the playoffs for each the men and women.
The photos below are from the women's playoffs.
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Awaiting Their Turn
In the shot above, we see an appearance of the archer featured earlier in “Badass Japanese Archery: Now It's The Ladies' Turn”, as well as another example of how focusing on the tip of the arrow just doesn't work well.
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Awaiting the Results
As I explained in earlier posts, I had a difficult time following the playoff rounds, but I think the three ladies in the shot above placed second, third, and fourth, with the winner having been decided in the previous round. I'm sure the winner is seen in one of the photos above, but unfortunately, I couldn't guess which she is.
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Tall Tale
young lady wielding a huge traditional Japanese archer's bow
Kyoto, Japan
( it's also somewhat of a tall tale for other reasons, presented below )
Picking up from my “Badass Japanese Archery: Now It's The Ladies' Turn” post the other day, here are some more of the very colorful young ladies at the shooting platform.
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Dozen at a Time
As described in “Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot”, each archer goes at her own pace, but each group of a dozen starts at the same time, so they're fairly in sync at the beginning, which can make for some interesting shots.
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Stringing the Arrow
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Second Arrow
You can tell it's the second arrow because she has no spare in her right hand. You can also tell by the fact that the group is much further out of sync, with more than half having already left the platform.
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As I mentioned in an earlier post the crowds were ridiculous, so it was challenging to get a good vantage point, and at that, “good” meant that you could see one or two archers well. With the crowd, hanging branches, ropes, lamp posts, and such, no place offered a good view of everyone, so it was always a compromise.
I figured I'd have less clutter in frame if I could zoom up more, so I switched to the 300mm zoom, and less foreground/background clutter with a thinner depth of field, so I kept it at f/2 most of the time. This would allow me to get more intimate with the archers, such as this boss-looking dude and this tough-looking badass.
The ladies could have the toughness, but their style of dress offered a softer side as well..
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Well Framed
There were about 90 groups of women, and I got there in time for the last eight or nine, so I had just a bit of time to try to jockey for different vantage points.
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Lined Up
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Anti Zoom
I could get a wider shot when the view to the furthest archer was relatively clear
( also, it helps that I moved slightly further down range )
Another way to get a wider shot is to composite multiple shots together, like the vertical panorama I opened up with, but that's a lot of work.
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( focus here is on the hands, but with her serious look lost to fuzziness, it doesn't work )
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Sporting Some Determination
So, about the “Tall Tale” caption to the lead photo, as I mentioned, it's a composition made from two separate photos stacked one above the other, but what I failed to mention is that the two photos are of different people, taken five minutes apart.
The top photo provided the bow, the visible body (face and arm), and most of the upper half of the hakama attire. The rest came from the lower photo, kindly provided by a conveniently-similar stance by the lady seen above in “Anti Zoom”.
Interestingly, sleeve of the bow arm from both ladies appears in the composition: they just happened to align such that one appears to be the inside of the other, and doing that area that way allowed other parts to blend more smoothly. Lucky happenstance.
I also removed a big ugly rope that had been cutting through the background, and extended the bow string along its natural path.
I did all this because I really liked how the top shot showed the mammoth size of the bow, but in it the archer was cut off just below the chest, leaving an unbalanced lack of person in the shot. Other shots of the same archer didn't show the bow as well, so I looked for a way to recover balance to the shot I liked, and among the 1,000 photos from the day, exactly one showed a clear view of one archer standing in the same spot, and voila, we have this post's opening image.
One more “tall tale” aspect is that the bow doesn't actually extend below the handle as far as implied by the composition because that particular bow is very uneven, with the portion above the handle much longer than that below. It's still absolutely gigantic, but not quite as much as implied. For reference, see this otherwise-unremarkable shot of the “upper-photo” archer...
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Miss Upper
unretouched
I've got to wonder whether that kind of bow is harder to shoot. I'd think that due to the uneven lengths to the curves, the bow string would not snap back perfectly perpendicular (the lower curve would have less distance, so would snap back quicker, I'd think).
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Every Little Bit
as badass as the guys
In yesterday's “Colorful Ladies' Wardrobe” post we looked at some of the young ladies preparing for their turn at traditional Japanese archery at the rite-of-passage event described in “Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot”. Before and after their turn they were as lively as you'd expect a bunch of twenty-year-old girls to be, but on the shooting platform they were all business, every bit worthy to appear along the likes of the guy seen in “More Badass Japanese Archery”.
I'd been disappointed early on when I was driven out by the ridiculous crowds just before the ladies started, but after having left for lunch, I decided to return toward the end, and found it substantially less crowded. (It was still ridiculously crowded, and I spent half the time letting old ladies stand on the chair I'd brought), but overall I could see quite a bit: the last 100 (of more than 1,000) women, then the instructors, then the “playoffs” for the guys, then for the girls. So note to self: next year, drop in at the end.
The earlier “Total Discipline” post may be helpful in following the next sequence...
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Staredown
(With my lack of skill in wielding the 300mm at f/2, many of these are soft or out of focus, but the lady's presence is so compelling that I've gone and made a couple of these into desktop backgrounds.)
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Initial Aim
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Horizontal Adjustment
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Vertical Adjustment
with what little focus the photo has on the tip of the arrow
( an idea that had merit, but didn't work out )
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Release
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Slight Emotion
Look of satisfaction?
These photos were from the playoff round, so out of more than a thousand women who participated, she was one of about a dozen women who had hit the target during the day. (It seemed to me that many more than that hit the target, so maybe one had to get a full-on bull's eye to progress to the playoffs. I don't know.)
She progressed to the next round after this shot, so if any emotion leaks out it should be of satisfaction, but it's hard to tell. The lead photo in this post is from the following round to determine the winner, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, I had a difficult time following the announcements of who won, so I don't know how she did. I do know that I'd certainly love to present her with copies of these photos some day.