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You know the feeling waking up to the realization that your alarm didn't go off and you have five minutes before you absolutely must be ready and gone? I've felt it all day.
But we now have our Christmas Cards and New Year Cards designed, uploaded, and ordered.
Not addressed and sent, but at least ordered.
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Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 720 — map & image data — nearby photos
Simple Tools
Creating a carving pattern with a string, bamboo brush, some ink, and a thumb
Kyoto, Japan
In “Nishimura Stone Lanterns: the Workshop” I introduced a stone-carver workshop in the Kitashirakawa area of Kyoto that I came across last week. I visited again the other day, stopping first at the workshop to request permission to visit their amazing back garden.
The workshop is open to the street, and upon walking up, Paul Barr and I found none other than Daizo Nishimura, the 5th-generation stonecarver/owner at work preparing a stone for carving. I took the photo above before he noticed us.
Upon seeing us, he immediately stopped his work to chat with us. I felt bad about interrupting his work, so kept my chat to a minimum, but got permission to visit the gardens. But as we left, he returned to work, which was compelling enough of a sight that we hung around to watch and take pictures.
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 900 — map & image data — nearby photos
Reinforcing the Lines
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/250 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bamboo Ink Pot
Noticing that we still there, he invited us in to take pictures, and cheerfully engaged me in conversation as he went about his work.
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/250 sec, f/2, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Brush of Split Bamboo
As he started carving, fine shards of granite started flying everywhere, including into my eyes. I jumped back and asked (in Japanese) “wow, don't you ever get this stuff in your eyes while you work?!” to which he replied “Yup, sure do, but you can't see well if you wear glasses...”
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/250 sec, f/8, ISO 4000 — map & image data — nearby photos
Starting The Detail Work
His dad (72-year-old Kenzo Nishimura) still works a full day, but was busy with a project at a location down the street, so wasn't there at the time. There were, however, two young, non-family apprentices at work on various projects, and the sound of three hammer pounding away at chisels filled the air as Paul and I ventured toward the back garden....
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I've just wasted the last two days on something more fun (and more frustrating) than any video game – Google's Picasa photo app “face recognition” stuff.
Google's Picasa desktop photo application includes the very cool feature of face recognition. Point it at a photo and it will identify where in the photo faces are to be found, and do so with great precision. I pointed Picasa at the 20,000 photos in my archive from this year (maybe 100,000 faces?) and there were no false positives, unless you don't count sculptures of faces as a face. Very impressive.
But like a modern Star Wars film (lots of cool effects, but no plot or acting or anything else that might contribute to making a good movie), the end result was disappointing because of a clumsy UI, poor recognition of who the face might be, and worst of all, a decidedly random approach to remembering what faces I've said belong to whom.
It took about a day and a half of crunching in the background for Picasa to chew on the 20,000 photos I threw it at, after which it grouped all the faces by person (as best it could figure), letting me ascribe names to the groups, and to fix errors in the groups. The application UI offers several different ways to approach the task of assigning names to faces and vice-versa, each with their pros and cons. Unfortunately, all the cons are severe. In one mode you can easily group photos so that the faces are all of the same few people, but it offers no way to group the results so you can indicate “these 20 faces are all such-and-such”; you actually have to actually type their name 20 times.
Another mode might allow you to indicate that a face should be ignored (e.g. some random stranger in the background of a shot), but other otherwise-more-useful modes don't offer that important feature, so if you see such a face while looking at suggestions for one person, the best you can do is indicate “not this person”, and so you're guaranteed to see the face again (and again and again) until you come across the face in the mode that actually allows you to ignore it.
Some modes make it very easy to say “these faces are/aren't this person”, but they make it very difficult to say “these faces are this other person.”
So, it becomes a pattern of jumping around modes to use each mode for what it seems best for, and you'd see the same faces over and over as you said “no, not this person either”, until you got fed up enough with it that you visited a mode where you could indicate who it was.
It was oddly addicting. It sucked me in like nothing else has since I made the mistake of giving Magic Pen a try a few years ago. I worked on the faces all day today, despite having promised myself a dozen different times that “I'll stop after tidying up this last person's faces.”
I should point out two very important caveats to my complaints above: 1) face recognition is new to Picasa (and to the world), so it's only natural that the UI will be a bit rough. It's a “version 1” application, so should be given time to mature before one can really expect a smooth UI. And 2), Google provides Picasa for free. Complainers should tread lightly.
Anyway, in the end I did abandon Picasa, and won't be returning to it any time soon. I'd certainly love to have all my photos “name tagged” (so to speak), but Picasa seems to have a very nasty habit of randomizing the data. I might mark 20 faces as being of the same someone, then return in five minutes to see that only one of those faces is there, but 47 other random faces are there as well, marked “confirmed”. This happened time and time again. At first I thought that I must simply be doing something wrong, but careful testing toward the end convinced me that it's just random, so no matter how cool the initial “where are the faces?” technology is, everything else as implemented in Picasa is not at all ready for prime time.
I built a plugin for Lightroom to suck over the name information from Picasa, but I'm now much less excited to release / maintain it (UPDATE: but nevertheless, I have released it here). It'll be interesting to see what Google does with this in future version — I don't doubt great things from them — but for now I'll just rely on my memory for photo face recognition. (It's also random, but the UI is better. 🙂 )
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D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm (cropped a bit) — 1/160 sec, f/7.1, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Three Leaves
Behind Nishimura Stone Lanterns, Kyoto Japan
As I mentioned yesterday, the visit to the workshop and gardens of Nishimura Stone Lanterns (a fifth-generation hand stone-carving business) and their back garden was an amazing, overwhelming, mentally draining experience.
I haven't even given my photos a first-pass inspection, but soon after taking the photo above I knew it was emblematic of our time there, and knew that I would post it early.
Here's a photo by Paul Barr of me taking it...
Nikon D3 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 62 mm — 1/100 sec, f/4, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Getting Close at 14mm
Photo by Paul Barr
As you can see in Paul's shot, the leaves are resting on a fairly simple square column, with a few adornments at the top, ending with a nice round ball. It looks like various pieces are stacked, but it's a single, solid piece of stone. It's one of the most simple items there.
Leaves were lying everywhere, but I felt drawn to how these three particular leaves found themselves on top of the column, so I endeavored to capture the scene, and the sense of calmness I felt they exuded.
The problem was that so very many opportunities immediately presented themselves that I felt overwhelmed. Unworthy. Inadequate.
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/200 sec, f/2, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Let Me Try on Edge, Abstract
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/200 sec, f/2, ISO 900 — map & image data — nearby photos
Maybe Standing Alone?
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/200 sec, f/2, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
What About Looking Straight Down?
Nikon D700 + Zeiss 100mm f/2 — 1/200 sec, f/2, ISO 1100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Let's Try For Something More Edgy
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm — 1/160 sec, f/7.1, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Ultra Wide Angle, Straight Down
I'm disappointed in that last shot because, well, it's boring, but I put a lot of work into getting it, so I'll share it here.
I'm not sure what I was hoping for, but I thought it might be a bit more dramatic, but as it was, the height of the pillar is completely lost and so the leaves lack context despite the fact that you can see all around them. Boring.
The problem I had in getting this shot in the first place was in keeping my feet out of frame. I'm tall and so have long arms for holding the camera away while pointing down, but apparently not long enough for when a 14mm lens is used with a full-frame camera. I couldn't stand far enough back to keep my legs out of frame.
So, I had Paul stand up-slope from me and adopt a sturdy stance as I took his hand in one of my own, then with his support I was able to lean waaaaaaay out and over the leaves with the camera in the other, then got the shot. If anyone saw us, I'm sure they thought we were nuts.
Anyway, I could have easily spent a good hour there with the camera just in exploring those three leaves. In the background of some of these shots you can certainly see that there are plenty of other stone columns, lanterns, basins, etc., and in wide sweeping views they're just that, “a bunch of stone things”. But as you walk around, you can see that each one is unique, captivating, and worthy of its own hour.... or two.
And there were hundreds.
It was truly overwhelming. It was exhausting as my mind raced among awe and wonderment at what must have gone into making each one, musings about how old each might be (the oldest item, we were told, predated the family, dated back 800 years), speculation as to what some of the less familiar shapes might be for, and always, consciously and unconsciously, running through photographic calculations.... compositions, depth of field, lighting, color.
It was “awesome” in both the younger generation's “really amazing” sense, and in the original “struck one with a deep feeling of awe” sense.
If I were a good photographer, I could produce a photo-filled post about this site every day for a year, and have it be interesting every time. I suspect that a very good photographer could do that using photos from just one season, but with the changing seasons (and even changing light during the course of a day) I'm sure many new opportunities are continually presenting themselves. I have never visited a place with such unbound potential.
It's a 15-minute drive from my place, so to tap that potential, I need only to become a good photographer.
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Water Basin
As I mentioned yesterday, Paul Barr and I made a return visit to the Nishimura Stone Lantern workshop today.
It was more amazing than I could have possibly imagined. It was overwhelming. I am so exhausted (from it, and from not having slept last night trying to build a plugin for Adobe Lightroom to import face-recognition data from Google's Picasa photo app) that I have not even unloaded my images from the camera.
But Paul, who has never used Lightroom, wanted to give it a try, so I loaded his images and gave him about a minute's instruction, and let him loose. Having been inspired by some of Stéphane Barbery's recent work – such as his Jidai Matsuri shots, or what he posted on Flickr last night (is there a way to link to a specific point in a Flickr photostream???) – Paul's experimentation tended along those lines.
Paul was limited by a lack of understanding about the tool (Lightroom), and a lack of ever having thought along these artistic lines, but one of the results before he, too, got too tired is really impressive, and with his permission I show it above.
I created a snapshot of his version, then lowered the vibrance way down, which quieted the colors considerably, and suggested that that would be Stéphane's version, but who knows? 🙂
For context, here's another of Paul's photos of the same stone water basin, from a different angle, without any post processing....
Nikon D3 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 50 mm — 1/160 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Copyright 2009 Paul Barr
The garden behind the stonecarver's workshop was awe inspiring chin-dropping emotionally-overwhelming amazing.