Day 4 of my camping trip with Anthony to Kotobikihama beach (northern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) was a day full of sun and sand, marred only by a few minutes of wind-driven terror (or, at least, wide-eyed surprise, as my tent almost got blown away).

The night was pleasantly warm, as opposed to the freeze-your-toes-off cold that it had been on previous nights, so that was welcome. Unfortunately, along with the warmth came a howling wind that buffeted the tent in loud gusts that were jarring both mentally and physically. I spent from about 1:30am to 3:00am trying to make sure my tent and Arthur's sunshade didn't get blown away, but the sunshade eventually succumbed. Arthur and I just balled it up and put it out of the wind.

Anthony slept through it all.

It was mostly calm in the morning, but we heard that it might rain in the evening. A little rain can really spoil things, especially making it more difficult to put away the tents (you have to ensure they're completely dry before you store them). Even at 8am, the sky didn't look all that inviting, so we decided to hedge our bets and make a contingency plan, with Arthur's wife checking around to the more experienced campers to see what they would do were it to rain.

She came back with great info about an inn that was near, had availability, and was reasonably priced. The timing was perfect, because just as she was telling us, we felt a few drops of rain. It was still only 10am, but that decided it, and she made the reservation.

We had four hours before we could check in, but we'd felt only a few drops, and it didn't “feel” like it would really rain for quite a while. So, we slowly started packing up.

At one point a man came over to present us with a tiny octopus he'd just caught....

Yesterday, the same man had unexpectedly caught a big octopus – its head was the size of a volleyball, and it took two grown men to carry – that he had shared with everyone. It was tasty.

We continued packing, with a few sprinkles coming and going, but it eventually really did start to rain, and everything became a complete mess. As I mentioned earlier in this story, there was a staggering amount of yellow pollen everywhere, and now with the rain, it became a soppy mess. It didn't seem to be water soluble, so didn't just run off with the water; you had to actually wipe it off.

Here's a the top of my car, sporting little puddles of pollen-filled water...

Toward the end, a storm arrived in full force. The wind became so continuously strong that I could actually pack away the three poles on one side of Arthur's sunshade, leaving it supported by only the three poles on the other side. The wind did the rest and kept the tarp well and completely over us the whole time, offering some protection from the rain as we finished packing. The wind was that strong.

By the time we got the last things and ourselves into our cars, it was a full downpour, and we were soaked. At least we'd made the reservation for the inn.

I had no idea where the inn was, so followed Arthur as his wife navigated. I was quite surprised when 30 seconds later – I kid you not – we arrived. It was a third of a mile away, just outside the entrance to the beach.

At a time when a dry area under an overpass would have been a welcome luxury, this place was heaven. The New Marutasou is a clean, neat, ryokan-style inn with three huge hotspring-fed baths. We took advantage of the hot baths right away, and Life was Good. Very Good.

After our baths we relaxed for a while, and I snapped this picture of Arthur's wife sitting in the window of their room as the wind and rain roared outside....

Toward the evening, the rain had stopped and we could see a nice sunset brewing, so I went out with the camera...

The sunset ended up being fairly lackluster (a photo of it appeared on this post on the day I returned).

The rain had stopped, but the wind was still blasting away powerfully, as were the wind-whipped waves. The area where we'd played yesterday was now all different, as both the storm-driven river and waves resculpted the sand.

When I returned, they were all playing Go Fish...

This inn is apparently known for its meals, but we got the non-meal plan, so ended up having what turned out to be wholly uninspiring bentos from a shop in town. But let me tell you, a shampoo and a hot bath makes everything okay, and we all slept wonderfully that evening.

Continued here...

On the way home from the park the other day, Anthony and I stopped by the Hotel Okura to pick up a birthday cake for Fumie's mom. Kyoto's Hotel Okura has a first-floor restaurant with excellent (although extremely expensive) food and cake that's part of our Christmas-Eve Tradition.

Not wanting to leave my camera outside in my bicycle basket, I had it with me, and couldn't help but take a picture of the lovely puffy flowers in the lobby. They're all fairly long hand-held exposures, but seem to have turned out okay.

Photo metadata has evolved a mix of seemingly comparable ways to label a photo. Lightroom allows you to enter a “Title”, a “Caption”, and a “Headline”, among others, so which should you use when you upload your images to an online photo-hosting service? That depends, of course, on how what fields you've entered into Lightroom, what you've entered into them, and your goal for the label.

My plugins for Adobe Lightroom that allow you to export photos to online photo-hosting services (for:  Zenfolio  ·  SmugMug  ·  Flickr  ·  Picasa Web ) allow for a simple selection from among the main labeling metadata fields, but I knew early on that it wasn't powerful enough for some people's captioning needs, so while I've been working on the Lightroom 2.0 versions of my plugins for the last many months, I built a new and powerful way for the plugin user to specify how the plugin should construct the captions that it sends to the photo-hosting service.

I've gone ahead and grafted that support back into the 1.x plugins (which should also work on the 2.0 beta) for Zenfolio and SmugMug as a test.

The new captioning method allows you to create templates that mix free text and metadata tokens, and to build up those templates into a personal list of captioning presets.

I describe the template system here: Preset Templates in my Lightroom Plugins

Because this template system was developed originally for the as-yet-unreleased Lightroom 2.0, they haven't gotten much general-public testing, so the UI might be a bit awkward (so I'm looking for comments/suggestions that might make it better.)

Also, be aware that the list of template tokens may change from release to release. It's been suggested that it would be better for the tokens to be case-insensitive, which means, for example, that I'd have to rename tokens like {yyyy} and {YYYY} (the current year, and the year the photo was taken, respectively).

For now, the new captioning system is optional, so these new versions should continue to work fine for those not wishing to try the new one. I hope. We'll see.

If things go well, I'll graft this into my Flickr and PicasaWeb plugins as well.

Latest versions are here:   plugin for Zenfolio  ·  plugin for SmugMug

Day 4 of my camping trip with Anthony started early, as usual, but without the prospect of having to move the tent (as I did the previous day), I looked forward to a day of fun.

Anthony's new friends had returned home the previous evening, but now he had May and Monet to play with, and added new friends Emma and her older brother, Benjamin, as well.

Kotobikihama beach is large – about a mile long – with several distinct sections. This morning, we headed out to the main part of the beach, which is quite a distance from the campground, around a bend on the shore....

The main area is huge, and apparently filled to capacity during the summer. It's got three important things going for it that no other beach in Japan has:

1. No smoking allowed.

   It's the first non-smoking beach in Japan, and as far as I know, the only one. That doesn't mean that everyone honors it (smokers aren't known for courtesy nor common sense), but it's a good start.

2. It's unbelievably clean.

   Most beaches in Japan are, frankly, disgusting piles of trash. Just filthy. This beach was spotless.

   When Anthony and I came to this part of the beach on day 2 of our trip, I also brought a metal detector along (a Garrett Ace 250) and the results were quite different from the last time I used a metal detector at a Japanese beach (Shirahama, about 15 years ago). Back then, I had to wade through all kinds of trash, but found a bucketful of 500-yen coins ($5 coins), so it was quite financially rewarding, if not tiring because of the sheer magnitude of trash.

   This time, I found essentially nothing. Over the course of about an hour, I found one 10-yen coin, two pull tabs, and maybe a couple of other random pieces of metal. I could go 15 minutes with the machine on “all metal” mode, at maximum sensitivity, and get not the slightest twitter. I kept checking my own wedding ring just to make sure that the batteries hadn't died, or something.

   Kotobikihama is amazingly, wonderfully clean.

3. The sand “sings”.

   When you shuffle along the sand at just the right speed, you get a singing tone from your feet. It's sort of odd in the same way that crystal glassware can suddenly sing when rubbed at just the right speed. The sound isn't as clear or beautiful as crystal, but it's noticeable. The beach name – kotobiki, 琴引 – literally means “to play a koto”.

This is all nice and fine, but the real attraction is a stream cutting right through the sand...

This is quite different from the hot river below the campsite, which is a small trickle from the overflow of a bath. This is a real stream that cuts through the sand, forging its own path that changes from day to day.

It cuts through some thick areas of sand, making banks up to perhaps 10 feet high, sometimes quite sheer....

Of course, there's the whole “ocean” thing to explore as well....

The stream is fresh water and cool, but compared to the ocean it's relatively warm, so play goes back and forth between the two.

When Anthony and I had visited two days earlier, the stream dove pretty much straight into the ocean, but today it had a long bend running almost parallel, before finally joining the salt water...

I find this kind of movement to be really interesting, and I'd love to be able to take a time lapse movie over the course of a week or two.

The kids don't care, of course, except that it means that they can smash down all the sheer edges of the stream, and know that they'll be back again soon...

New friend Emma (five or six years old, in the blue flower hat above) also joined us. Her dad is from London and mom from Kyoto. She was fast friends with this group.

May was sort of the odd man out, being the only one not 5 or 6 years old, but she was a joy (the minute or so captured above, excluded).

Arthur is great with kids, and here enlisted them to build a special kind of sand castle using a dripping-sand technique that my former boss once showed me....

He then explained that it was magical, and that if they chanted the proper magical spells, it would allow whoever stood inside to fly. So he'd make up some magical-sounding silly words/sounds and all the kids would repeat, and then the one in the castle would jump, and sure enough, they felt that they could jump just a bit higher than normal...

Once that was done, he played some patty-cake with the girls....

Arthur is really such a kind and gentle soul. On the way back to camp, we stopped by the outside bath to clean up a bit, and when he realized later that he'd still had his wallet in his pocket, he just smiled and took it in stride.

Also, at one point in the afternoon, an amazing wind came out of nowhere and blew down his tarp and almost flattened our tents. It had been hot and still, when suddenly a cold wind whipped up. For everyone else in the campground it was just a pleasant breeze, but because of how our tents were right at the top edge of a sloping sea-facing cliff, they got blasted by a funneled jet of air that was almost tornado-like in its localized fury. For 15 minutes, Arthur, I and another man who ran to our aid held down my tent, until the wind stopped as suddenly as it had started.

It was all quite surreal, but Arthur's calming attitude (he has a calm attitude about everything) was contagious, and so we looked on the bright side and were thankful for the cool breeze.

Later, Arthur made another castle with the kids at the beach below our tents, then went snorkeling a bit. He used to be a professional diver, so this is familiar territory for him.

In the evening, I got out my tripod to try to capture some sparkler action...

I also tried a family portrait of Emma, Benjamin, and their folks, but 15 seconds is a long time to ask a couple of kids to stand still....

The lights on the horizon are from fishing boats, I presume. They were really bright, casting shadows even though they must be 10 miles away.

Continued here...

At right is a short timelapse video (12 seconds, no sound) that Lightroom expert Sean McCormack made from the collection of 300 images he ended up with after setting his camera up on a tripod and having it take a shot every 10 seconds for 50 minutes.

To see the high-resolution version, go here and look for the “four arrows” icon at the lower-right of the video. Click that to put the video into full-screen mode. Then, click the “scaling is on” badge in the upper right to turn scaling off so you see the original size. Then, play the video.

He didn't move the camera during the hour the pictures were being taken, so the original images from the camera were, of course, of one static view. To create the panning effect, Sean used a combination of Adobe Lightroom and little Perl script that I created for him.

I'm publishing the script here in case the more adventurous timelapse makers among you wish to use it. I say adventurous because it's not particularly straightforward, it requires some technical abilities, and it's possible that it could corrupt the images (but you do have backups, right?).

Prerequisites

The instructions assume that...

• You already have the original frames.

• You have perl available on your system.

  Macs come with perl already installed. Windows users can get a free version at ActiveState.

• You can work in a command window (Win) or a Terminal Window (Mac).

• You know how to convert a bunch of images into a video.

The script itself is here: pan (save as a raw text file; the instructions assume that you name the file “pan”)

Instructions

1. Make backups of the images. Really.

2. Load the frames into Adobe Lightroom.

3. Crop the first frame where you want your pan to start. You'll probably want to use a crop with the same aspect ratio as your target video format. Do not use any rotation because the panning script can't yet handle rotation.

4. Copy that crop (Ctrl-Shift-C) and apply it (Ctrl-Shift-V) to the final frame. Then, ensuring that the aspect ratio is locked, move/resize the crop to how you want it at the end of the video.

   If you don't resize the crop, but only move it, you'll end up with a simple pan. If you also resize the crop, you'll end up with a zoom-in or zoom-out Ken Burns effect.

5. Now, apply a crop (any crop) to all the intervening frames. You can, for example, simply apply the crop you happened to have from step #3 above. It doesn't matter exactly what crop you apply because it'll end up getting changed by my script, but you must apply some crop at this point.

6. Select all the frames, and “Save Metadata to Files” (Ctrl-S).

7. Now switch to a terminal/command window, and cd to the folder holding the images in question.

8. Run the command “perl pan” and name all the files for the frames, in order, as arguments. If all the frames are by themselves in one folder, and the images are named sequentially, you can usually get away with simply typing:

      perl pan *.jpg

   with the caveat that you'll have to give the full path to the script (or first copy the script to image folder).

   WARNING: the script writes a new crop directly into the intervening frames, but does so in a way that's not very smart and is very brittle; it could easily screw up and corrupt your images. Be sure to have backups.

9. Back in Lightroom, select all the frames and “Read metadata from Files”. Lightroom will load the crop info that the script wrote to the files. (The script does not modify the first and last frames, so you don't need to include those frames in this step, but it doesn't hurt.)

You can now export all the frames and create the video. Be sure to resize to uniform dimensions if the pan involves any kind of zooming.

I've never actually done one of these myself (my experiences with timelapse photography is limited to this short cherry-blossom timelapse), but I'll try some day soon. I'd like to see what others come up with, so if you make one, let me know!