Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/80 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hello
Seen parked at a local convenience store, in Kyoto, Japan
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 44 mm — 1/30 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — 1/50 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1250 — map & image data — nearby photos
I'm sort of left speechless, so no further comment, except to note that the side-view mirrors seem woefully underaccessorized, relatively speaking.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/50 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Yoko-chan Preparing to Sing
It's been a busy few days, photographically speaking. The other day Anthony went swimming in the river with Greg. This evening I had one photo-op event with noh musician Riko-chan's daddy, and another with Yoko-chan, whose daddy arranged for my recent visit to a Japanese high school. On the way home, I spotted the most amazing (not in a good way) car in the parking lot of a convenience store, and had to whip out the camera then as well. Much photo-processing awaits.
This post is about Yoko-chan, one of Anthony's kindergarten friends. She performed today at the Kyoto Brighton Hotel's “Relay Music Festival in Atrium”, which is a series of free musical performances every evening in July. They've apparently been doing it a while, because tonight's was performance #519 (for the series, not for Yoko-chan :-)).
The hotel has a large atrium, at one end of which is the stage....
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — 1/40 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Brighton Hotel
Kyoto, Japan
There is, to a first approximation, no light inside. I was expecting the worst, but wow, it just goes to show what a monopod and a little VR can do. This next shot was taken with my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom at full 200mm zoom, with a glacially long 1/20th second shutter...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nervous Kids Waiting to Perform
There was a mix of women and girls, singing old children's folk songs. Yoko-chan's daddy told me that most people wouldn't even know them today, but most people's grandparents would. I actually knew one song because I heard it over and over and over in a Bank of Kyoto radio commercial that played about every five minutes throughout the afternoons while I was working on the first edition of my book in 1994-1996.
Anyway, they came out and sang very nicely...
The kids both sang and did little dances. I'm not sure what's going on in this next shot, but it's cute...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — 1/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Yoko-chan's daddy is also a camera geek, and was getting shots as well. I like to get the shot of people getting the shot, so where we are....
I don't know about you, but I'm just a sucker for little kids in traditional Japanese dress. Cute. cute. cute.
It was over all too quickly, and Yoko-chan came out to be greeted by a bunch of her classmates...
There was even less light after the show, because now there were no spotlights. I switched my super-fast Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens for the lobby shots. Here's Yoko-chan's daddy and other parents waiting for the kids...
The lady in red is Mizuki-chan's mommy. I see Mizuki-chan at “Jumping” (preschool gymnastics) and just know that she will be participating in the 2020 Olympics in some event. I hope she'll let me take pictures.
I can't seem to stop humming the tunes from this little, quirky, three-part musical, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's funny and witty in a way I find quite enjoyable (and I don't normally find musicals to be enjoyable. At all. Ever.).
It's apparently free to view until Sunday night, after which it'll be available for purchase at the iTunes Store.
I've been tinkering for the last year or so with a “photostream” addition to my blog, in which I can highlight the occasional not-too-bad photo I post on my blog. I'm not sure it's really ready, but I'm releasing it now and we'll see how it goes.
I've partitioned up the best images from my blog into several photostreams, including one for Japan, and one for each season: Spring · Summer · Autumn · Winter. There's also a catch-all Miscellaneous stream for odd, kooky, or otherwise interesting (but not necessarily “pretty”) photos, and a stream full of pictures of my kid that I suspect only I and my mom will use. Finally, there's an overall “Main” stream that includes all the non-kid photos.
I try to include only good photos in each stream, but I give you a way to let me know that one isn't really good enough for inclusion. (More on that in a bit.)
Visiting a stream's page, you see a gird three pictures wide. It may take a while to load, but I make sure to load images from the top down, the screen should fill up fairly quickly. You can scroll down, or hit the [reshuffle] button to see different pictures.
Clicking on a photo leads to a page like this...
Floating at the top is a control panel...
The control panel is normally intended to be hidden. Mouse down to the lower half of the screen, and it'll disappear.
To visit the next picture in the stream, use the N key.
To go back to the previous picture, use the P key.
To visit the blog post associated with the picture, hit ENTER.
To return to the grid of photos, use the ESC key.
Bringing the mouse to the upper half of the screen recalls the control panel, which you can use to start a slideshow, vote on a photo that you think is better/worse than average for the stream, etc.
Returning to the grid (via the ESC key, or the grid icon in the control panel), and in the upper-right you'll find links to the other photostreams, and to the Media RSS feed for the stream.
I spent considerable effort in building it to make it efficient (it pre-downloads the next few images while you're looking at one, for example), but there's a lot of image data involved, so the first time you try it, it'll likely be fairly sluggish for the first few pictures.
— Start here —
As I said, I've been tinkering with this on and off for the better part of a year. I got the idea when I saw the FoxSaver add-on for Firefox (the name coming from Firefox + Screen Saver) that could turn any Media-RSS feed into a pretty screensaver-like slideshow. You can view my streams with it, but better yet, you can view its streams of really amazing photos.
Anyway, every few months, I'd return to tinker more. It's a lot of heavy JavaScript that would have been impossible for me without the most-excellent Yahoo! User Interface Library, so thank you Yahoo!.
I finally got serious with it in May when I built the “control panel” thing. It would be an understatement to say that graphical design is not my strong point, but I was really happy with how it came out.
I had a friend whose opinion I respect take a look at my photostream stuff at that point, and his response was essentially “it's great, except for the really ugly control panel.”. Doh!
Since then, I've spent the last couple of months deep in though on how to fix things, but I've come up with nothing, so yesterday I slapped the “... to dismiss this overlay” note onto the panel in the hope that greater education is the key, and we'll see how it goes.
Give it a try, and let me know what you think...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — 1/250 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Japanese “The Way of the Bump” Road Repair
ugly, careless patch in the middle of a newly-paved road
You know the old saying “If you want it to rain, wash the car”..., well, something along the same lines in Japan might be “If you want someone to hack up your street and leave it a bumpy, jumbled mess of uneven bone-jarring patches, pave it.”
A stretch of Teramachi St. near Anthony's kindergarten was, for years, one of the worst streets in Kyoto. It was paved recently, but before that – I really should have taken a picture – there wasn't an inch of the stretch I used that was original. It was a literal patchwork of years of cut-dig-patch cycles.
There's apparently a lot under Japanese roads – especially the smaller ones in residential areas – that someone always seems to need access to. One house needs to replace the water line... another the gas line... a third the sewer line... oops, the water line that was replaced two weeks ago was the wrong color, so it needs to be replaced again. It never seems to end. With each, the construction company that gets the job comes out, sets up their orange cones and disrupts traffic while they use a big cutter to slice through the road asphalt. After they do whatever they where hired to do, they dump some hot asphalt into the hole and run away. No one seems to care that they've now left a big uneven bump where the road used to be.
What I find particularly amazing is that when a road is repaved, it's almost inevitable that it will get one of these bumpy patches in very short order. I've seen it happen time and time again. You suffer through the construction while the road is repaved, and a week or two later, before your rejoicing at the beautiful, smooth, not-ugly-looking pavement has even started to subside, someone comes and puts a big ugly bone-jarring wart in it AND NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE! (except me, I guess).
And so it was with Teramachi St. It's the most convenient access for Anthony's school, but it was so bumpy that I tried to avoid it until it was paved recently, after which it was smoooooooth and wonderful. A few weeks later, right on schedule, boom, a big ugly bumpy patch in the newly-paved street and the newly-paved sidewalk. Sigh. At least this patch was smoother than most, but that counts for little because I'm sure it's only a short matter of time before the next dozen careless, bumpy patches. 🙁
So, I went and took a picture one day with the intent to write this post, but I waited to long to do the writing. Had I actually written and published the post when I took the picture last month, it would be with great satisfaction to report that this week, the ugly patch was replaced by a much smoother, much less ugly width-of-the-street patch. I've never seen that, and so would have taken credit for it. 🙂