Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/1250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200 — full exif
View From my Kitchen Window

I don't want to leave the negativity of the previous post on the top of my blog for too long, so I'm posting a couple of snapshots that I just took from the kitchen window. Nothing spectacular, but better than venting.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/1500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200 — full exif

I was feeling just dandy last Saturday morning while we awaited the airport shuttle to pick us up to start a five-day mini vacation to a somewhat tropical island in southern Japan, so I was more than a little dismayed when after hauling the luggage down to the van and settling into my seat that I suddenly realized that my cold – one that plagued me for a month but had, I thought, been over for the last week – had returned with the almost audible thud of a proverbial ton of bricks hitting me. I suddenly felt miserable, and the shuttle driver hadn't even returned to his seat after loading our bags.

Our flight and five days in paradise awaited.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/1000 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
This Pretty Much Says it All
Dead sunflower in a field of pretty red and pink flowers
Amami Ooshima, in the East China Sea in southern Japan

Other than being sick the whole time, it actually was a nice trip, but being sick was only the start of what seems to have been a cursed vacation. So many little things went wrong that it started to become comical even while we were being besieged by them.

I don't like to complain (too much) on my blog, but I do want to record some of the issues we faced just so that I can revisit and laugh at them in later years. It was not a “vacation to hell” or anything like that... just a “one of those days” type vacation.

We went to Amami Ooshima Island in southern Japan, repeating an excellent new-year's trip that produced a bunch of posts with more still in the queue. The primary goal this time was for Fumie to attend a concert event that included an appearance by Kousuke Atari, a Japanese pop singer we like and have seen many times before.

Anyway, let me list some of the “issues” we faced....

1. I was sick the entire time.

2. Fumie's attraction for this particular Kouskuke Atari concert was that it was being held in his home town (the small city of Naze, on Amami Ooshima Island) and due to the nature of the event, he was expected to perform the traditional folk singing he was locally famous for before becoming a professional pop singer. I don't care for the twangy nature of this genre so didn't attend the concert, but Fumie was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, it turns out that he did only one such song, as an encore. His concert was otherwise pretty much the same as all the others we've attended (which isn't bad, but disappointing considering the expectations).

   (As an example of this traditional music, try track 5 on this page for a CD he made six years ago, in his early 20s. Contrast that with his latest pop single, which (annoyingly) starts playing automatically when you visit his official site at his record label.)

3. Fumie's goal for the trip was the concert, but for myself, I wanted to be sure to visit Honohoshi Seaside, a “beach” that has grapefruit-sized smooth rocks instead of sand (seen on this earlier post), to make an audio recording of the surf, which – due to the rocks – makes a wonderfully interesting and soothing sound.

   We tried to make the two-hour drive on the 3rd day, but I was just too sick, so we had to return. I felt a bit better the next day, so we made the drive and arrived to promptly find that the video camera I'd prepared was not in my A/V backpack where I thought it was. I had the external mic and extra batteries, but no camera. I tore the car apart looking for it, but we must have left it at the hotel. Sigh.

4. To add insult to injury, I found out the next day that it was in the car while I was looking for it, but in an arm-rest compartment that I didn't realize was there (at least, not after having apparently placed the thing inside earlier in the trip).

5. After spending a few frustrating minutes trying to attach a polarizing filter at the beach, I discovered that I couldn't do so because there was a dent in the outer edge of the lens where the filter threads are.

   I've traditionally kept clear “protect” filters on my lenses, but lately have wondered whether the protection they afford is worth whatever degradation they cause to the image. I know that these filters can cause ghosting in really dark situations, but otherwise I've assumed that they don't degrade the image. Lately, though, I've thought to try without them until I can quantitatively measure their effect, so last week I took them off.

   Thus, when I bumped the edge of the lens sometime since then, I ended up damaging my $2,000 Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom instead of an $80 filter.

   Doh!

6. After leaving Honohoshi Seaside, we thought to make a couple-hour detour toward the western (largely unpopulated) edge of the island to see the sunset. I used the map in the car navigation system to pick a likely spot, and we made the drive only to arrive to find that I'd not noticed a huge sub-island right off the coast, totally blocking any concept of a sunset. It was right there on the car-navi map; I was just stupid for not having noticed it earlier.

7. So, we returned to the hotel just in time before the restaurant closed, and our dinner was waiting for us. While eating, we found out that Kousuke Atari had eaten at the table right next to us, a couple of hours earlier. Had we not made the ill-fated attempt to see the sunset, we would have had dinner right next to him (and we would have become a bullet point on his “things that annoyed me during my trip home” post :-))

8. Our hotel package came with pre-planned breakfasts and dinners, and the volume of food they brought was so overwhelmingly astounding that I continually felt really bad about the egregious waste of food that no one human could possibly eat, even when not having a cold.

   The one day that I stood a chance to actually make a good dent in what they offered – the yakiniku barbecue on the night we just missed Kousuke Atari – I felt a bit queasy from the cold and couldn't do more than nibble.

9. At some point while taking pictures of Anthony running around on the beach, I realized that my camera was not in its highest-quality “raw mode”, but had somehow gotten switched to low-quality “basic jpg” mode. Ugh. I'm still a bad enough photographer that I rely on the latitude that shooting raw affords, and that was lost for a whole day's worth of pictures.

10. I got a call from Zak telling me that my blog had been down for the last couple of days, in case I wasn't aware of it. No, I wasn't. (With help from Zak and my brother, I was able to get things repaired, so their help is a bright spot that I appreciate.)

There really were some wonderful moments (and I'll share them another day), so I'm glad we went, but it did feel a bit cursed at times. I enjoy the location, so I look forward to going again sometime, preferably when I'm not sick(!)

Having gone also saved us from the apparently horrible cold and rainy weather in Kyoto during the time. We returned yesterday afternoon to a dreary Kyoto, with cherry blossoms approaching full bloom but appearing totally drab and pathetic. Traffic in our area was a nightmare, as it is twice every year, during cherry-blossom and fall-foliage seasons.

I returned to find 510 emails messages in my queue (all but a few being spam or related to my server problems), 360 unread messages on the private Lightroom beta-testers forum, and 100+ unread items on the blogs I read. Add to that the release of Lightroom 2.0 beta that I was out of town for, and the 1,207 photos we took, and I had my work cut out for me.

Today, my cold is a bit better and the weather is wonderful. The sun is out and the cherry blossoms look great, just begging to be photographed. I'm not sure I quite have the energy today, but the forecast is for ever-improving weather for the next few days, so things continue to look up.

Adobe Lightroom 2.0 beta
Screenshot showing some new features in action
(in this case, selective-area desaturation and a post-crop vignette)

I like to post right away when there's a new release of Adobe Lightroom, but alas, I've been on vacation for the last few days, and I was at the car-rental return at the Amami Ooshima Island airport when Lightroom 2.0 beta was released earlier this afternoon.

The 2.0 beta has a lot of exciting new features you can read about elsewhere (links below), but the ones I'm most excited about are localized corrections (you can “paint” exposure, saturation, tint, etc.) and multi-monitor / multi-window support. Now you know why I finally succumbed and added a second monitor a few months ago.

For details:

I'll repeat the main points you need to understand before using it:

• Adobe is making it available so that you can kick the tires; it's not recommended for production work. By design, you can't work with your Lightroom 1.x catalogs in the 2.0 beta. Furthermore, you can't be sure that the 2.0 beta catalogs will be completely usable in the “real” 2.0 (which will be released, presumably, some time during the summer).

• It's free for Lightroom 1.x customers (the beta expires August 31st, by which one presumes the real Lightroom 2.0 will have been released). Anyone else can try it freely for 30 days, just as with the currently-latest production version, Lightroom 1.3.

• You can install and use both Lightroom 1.x and the 2.0 beta side-by-side on the same computer.

My existing Lightroom export plugins (for: Zenfolio,  ·  SmugMug  ·  Flickr  ·  Picasa Web) should work fine in the beta. Plugins are much easier to install in 2.0: you place them anywhere on your system you like, then point to them via the new File > Plugin Manager dialog.

Over the last few months that I've been working with Lightroom 2.0 development, I've been rearchitecting my plugins to both take advantage of new plugin support in 2.0, and to make it easier for me to add features across all my plugins (and to add new plugin destinations). Unfortunately, I've had a cold for so long that I'm not ready to release them yet, so it'll still be a while. But as I said, my original plugins for Lightroom 1.x should work fine in the 2.0 beta.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/180 sec, f/10, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Delicate (but Thoroughly) Pink
Cherry Blossoms · Kyoto, Japan

I'm not sure what variety these blossoms are, but they're quite different from the standard white blossoms that are just getting going in Kyoto, the late-blooming fluffy pink variety, and (of course) the deeply rich plum-blossom pinks. The colors are much like the shidare zakura (“crimson willow cherry”) that fill the nearby Heian-Shrine, but the tree doesn't seem all that willowy, so I don't know.

I've been busy on Lightroom projects, and trying to get ready for a short trip to the Amami Islands that we're starting tomorrow morning, but I knew this tree was at full bloom, so I made the five-minute walk over to see it today.

On the way, I was struck by a green willowy tree among the just-getting-started normal cherry blossoms, along the canal...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 82 mm — ¹/2500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sorta' Pretty

Pictures taken from this same vantage point have appeared in my blog many times:
  · Kyoto Cherry-Blossom Preview
  · Night Long-Exposure Cherry Blossoms
  · Cooling Off with Pastel Cherry-Blossom Desktop Backgrounds
The bridge in the background is the on featured in last month's Snowy Bridge in Kyoto post.

Anyway, I like the flowing green tree. I didn't realize it until I got back and inspected my photos that the tree either has really fuzzy leaf/seed/whatevers, or is totally infested with fuzzy green caterpillars. Here's a closer view from a different angle...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Fuzzy Willowy Green Stuff
(click for a larer version showing more detail)

However, my destination was another minute away....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/3200 sec, f/3.2, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/500 sec, f/8, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hmmm, These Look Sorta' Willowy

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — ¹/500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Not so Willowy

They're all from the same tree, a huge tree on an empty lot with a tall ugly fence in front (made to look like an ivy-covered brick wall) and surrounded by ugly utility poles and wires. Ugh.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — ¹/640 sec, f/6.3, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Looks Better Up Close

As nice as the tree is (or would be in better surroundings), it's much more spectacular in the fall, with colors so intense that you can sear a retina just glancing at it. I couldn't find any photos of it in my image library, likely because of its unphotogenic surroundings. Such is the challenge of living in an urban area in Japan.

While in the area, I noticed this motorcycle officer waiting to catch people running a stop sign....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 155 mm — ¹/3000 sec, f/2.8, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Thou Shalt Not Run The Stop Sign

I waved when I took the shot, but he didn't so much as blink. Perhaps he was looking past me to the cherry tree behind me.

The last time I saw him there was in the fall when I'd walked out to get pictures of some of the foliage along the canal. He was there with two other officers, just shooting fish in a barrel. Today he was alone, and apparently not in the mood to write tickets because I saw people totally blast through the stop (while pedestrians were in the crosswalk!) and he didn't do anything. Sigh.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/800 sec, f/6.3, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Walking By

On the way home, some young girls (perhaps in middle school) were sounding pretty darn good with their brass...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 98 mm — ¹/500 sec, f/3.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Jam Session

You may remember that budding tree on the left – at a much chillier time – from the final image on my Amazing Snow at the Heian Shrine post last month.

I probably won't post while we're in Amami, so this'll likely be my last post until the middle of next week....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/320 sec, f/2, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hirozou Yasuda

As I mentioned on my recent Overwhelmed: an Embarrassment of Riches post, I've been meaning to write about Hirozou Yasuda (安田ひろぞう, or just “Hirozou-san”), the guide we had for a day on Kakeromajima, one of the small southern-Japanese Amami islands in the East China Sea.

We're getting ready for another trip to Amami this weekend, having visited the first time over the New-Year's holidays. I don't know that we'll run into Hirozou-san, but Fumie has been exchanging emails, so I hope so. We really enjoyed the day we spent together.

I tended to take pictures of Anthony, so most pictures I have of Hirozou-san are him interacting with Anthony, which he was excellent at. He was always teaching, although Anthony never realized it.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 22 mm — ¹/200 sec, f/3.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Peek

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 17 mm — ¹/90 sec, f/4.5, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sure, He Can Climb!
which is just as well, 'cause he's already started....

We spent a lot of time at the Spooky Tree, which we'd never have found without him. He was always offering little tidbits of information about what we were looking at, or the surroundings, or things we passed. He knows everything, but tempers that with a very good “you'll find this entertaining or interesting” filter.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/160 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
How About If I do This!?

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 55 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/320 sec, f/2, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hamming It Up For Anthony

He doesn't speak English fluently, but guides a fair number of English-speaking clients, mostly botanists and bird watchers who come from all corners of the world to visit the unique species of these islands.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/180 sec, f/3.5, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
A Serious Discussion...

... that turns out to be setup to....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/400 sec, f/2, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
...Doing Something With a Seed (??)

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/640 sec, f/2, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Ah, The Old “Seed On the Nose” Trick

(I didn't hear the conversation so I don't know what the seed on the nose was about, but it was a hit with Anthony.)

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 @ 55 mm — ¹/160 sec, f/4.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Explaining Shells and Sea Creatures
picked up on the beach

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/2500 sec, f/2, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Enjoying Life

He grew up and still lives on Amami Ooshima (the largest of the islands in the group), and you can tell that he loves every moment.

Hirozou-san's sites (in Japanese):   blog  ·  business