Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/640 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Mean, Nasty Demons
The Heian Shrine (a huge shrine in eastern Kyoto) had Setsubun events today (Wikipedia on “Setsubun”). The main event associated with Setsubun is mamemaki – 豆撒き, literally “bean scattering” – which involves throwing dried beans at demons while yelling “demons out! Good fortune in!”
As you might expect of any event that involves the throwing of beans, kids love it.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nasty Demon Threatens Docile Camera-Toting Population
Kids love it unless they think the demons are real...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — 1/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Hiding Behind Mommy
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 110mm — 1/2500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Mr. Whitehair-and-Orangepants Heads Away
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 86mm — 1/640 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Cautiously Emerging, Still Wary
The demons eventually headed up toward the main building of the shrine, where unbeknownst to them, beans awaited.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Menacing the Good Townsfolk
The parent in me was surprised at how few children attended the event. There were a lot of people of every age, but I would have expected a decidedly kid-heavy crowd.
The camera geek in me was thrilled with how many beefy, hunky SLRs were in attendance. I saw a huge Leica SLR (an M9, I think). There was one big Canon pro-level SLR with a big hunk of white zoom lens. And I saw about 100 Nikon SLRs – mostly D200 and D2x, but I also noticed the occasional consumer SLR and film SLR as well. Nikon and Canon compete in many different markets, but it was evident today that Nikon had won the bean-throwing crowd. (As for me, I'm agnostic: I have one of each brand.)
The shrine guy in the upper-left of the next shot (wearing purplish lowers) is wielding a Nikon SLR with a humongous lens, although you can't appreciate the lens size from this angle.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/1250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Lotsa' Cameras
Eventually, the demons wore out their welcome, and they were met by half a dozen bean-throwing dignitaries, who promptly drove them out of the shrine area.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/250 sec, f/5.6, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
I Bean Thee
(If you look carefully, you can see the beans mid-flight)
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/180 sec, f/5.6, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Demons Get 0wn3d
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 90mm — 1/250 sec, f/5.6, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Triclops Looks For Help
(ain't gonna get it)
A kind man gave Anthony some beans to throw at the demons, but he was reluctant to do so (even though he was sitting on my shoulders by this time). I knew that he was a bit scard by the event – that's half the fun – but I didn't find out until later that he truly thought that the demons were real. We looked over some of the 400 pictures I took, and found signs that perhaps they weren't real – they had people shoes instead of demon shoes, people hands, etc. – so he knows now that they were people dressed up as demons, but I'm not sure he really buys it.
Anyway, the beans in setsubun are meant to symbolize goodness and good fortune, which is why they can drive away the demons. On the other hand, those same qualities are beneficial to people, so the next part of the event involves having beans thrown at you. I'll leave that for another day's post.
Before ending this post, I'd like to revisit this shot from above:
In it, you can see an out-of-focus lantern hanging in the background right above the demon's head. In this post from 2006, you can see a new bride standing under that very lantern. I love the lanterns at the Heian Shrine since first photographing them a couple of years ago. One of the gifts that an interest in photography has given me is the ability to notice more of the simple beauty that surrounds us, a visual form of “stop and smell the roses”, if you will.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
North-Eastern Amami-Ooshima
the area where Fumie's grandmother lived before WWII
As I wrote before, it was often windy and rainy during our New-Year's trip to Amami, in southern Japan, but the weather was quite dynamic and squall might be immediately followed by brilliant sunshine.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 40mm — 1/200 sec, f/10, ISO 125 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — 1/1250 sec, f/10, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Within 10 minutes of each of these photos being taken, it was raining.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 19mm — 1/15 sec, f/3.5, ISO 400 — full exif
Schweeeeet!
A bad photo of my new multiple-monitor goodness
I found myself suddenly lusting for a second monitor (Lightroom 2 supports two monitors), and with visions of a tax writeoff dancing in my head, I opted for the mid-level Eizo FlexScan SX2461W, a 24" widescreen that offers a 1,920 × 1,200 desktop in luscious relatively-wide-gamut color.
(If I'd had visions of hitting the lottery dancing in my head, I'd have gone for the $6,000 Eizo ColorEdge CG221)
I had trouble setting up my XP box for dual monitors until I installed the latest drivers for my ATI graphics card — ATI's new “Catalyst Control Center” made it trivial to set up the two monitors to work in concert just as I wished.
The new Eizo is in the center of the crappy snapshot shown above, with the Dell running a pretty-pictures slideshow on the side (currently showing an image from this Cherry-Blossom post), and my MacBook sitting in the lower center. The Eizo looks much smaller than it actually is – it positively dwarfs the tiny laptop – due to the perspectives of the closer-quarter shooting that a wide-angle lens affords (as seen here).
Anyway, after getting things set up, I calibrated and profiled the new monitor with my GretagMacbeth Eye-One hardware spectrophotometer. I also redid my old (and still excellent) Dell 2001FP, the 21" 1,600 × 1,200 LCD I've been using for the last four years.
The difference in color quality between the two was immediate and shocking.
No monitor can display every possible color, so every monitor is necessarily a compromise. If you compromise more on the budget, you can compromise less on the quality, and so my mid-level Eizo (it cost about $1,300) can show a wider range of colors than the lower-level Dell (which four years ago cost $1,000, but now costs much less).
The image at right is a false-color representation of the chromaticities that each monitor can produce. “Chromaticity” more or less means “color without regard to brightness”, and the chart shows that the Eizo can show reds that are a bit deeper than the Dell can, and richer greens. Oddly, the Dell actually has a slight edge on the blues.
(For those few of you actually inspecting the diagram, it's important to remember that it is a false-color diagram – the colors shown are wildly off – and by necessity they must be because the chart aims to signify in part colors that no monitor in the world can reproduce. Also, due to the mathematical nature of how the plot is derived, differences in the green area of the plot seem exaggerated. For more about these kind of shark-fin plots, see my writeup on chromaticity diagrams.)
Many photos look exactly the same on the two monitors, because both monitors can reproduce equally well wide swaths of the spectrum. It's only when colors fall outside the Dell's ability – outside the black triangle in the (false-color) diagram – does the Eizo show its stuff. However, it just so happens that the flowers in my previous post have some of those rich colors, and so they look glorious on the Eizo. Absolutely Glorious. My Dell pales in comparison, and now the LCD on my MacBook seems downright dull.
The diagram shows only a small difference in the red area covered by the two monitors, but the practical difference is huge. The Eizo can produce reds that I've not seen on a monitor before... deep, rich, intense reds that burn into the retina. I'm not talking about “brightness” or “saturation”... I could turn both controls on my Dell to their maximum and it still won't be able to produce colors that it can't produce. This is a whole new flavor of “red”.
Most photos don't have these deep rich reds, but one odd byproduct of this is that non-photo reds (such as the Yahoo! logo) almost dance off the screen to sear your eyes. It's a bit of a simplification to explain it this way, but basically, these kind of reds translate into “the reddest red your monitor can produce”, and so I see these glorious colors everywhere.
The “gloriousness”, of course, is that I'm not used to seeing them on my monitor, and so its the novelty that's most wonderful. I'll eventually get used to it, but it's important to remember that these (and better) colors are all around in real life. Perhaps I should check it out sometime 🙂
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — 1/350 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Pretty Flowers
It's been a while since I've posted something pretty just for the sake of posting something pretty. I used the photo above to illustrate the Book on Photography that Doesn't Suck in my Good Photographers, Bad Writers post last year.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 38mm — 1/640 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — 1/2000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — 1/640 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — 1/1000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
I came across these flowers outside someone's home, on the way back from the Kyoto Keage Water-Treatment Plant last May, after I'd just about been blinded by the brilliant beauty of a bazillion azaleas.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — 1/125 sec, f/3.2, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Type 700 Bullet Train Prepares to Leave Kyoto
Japan's Bullet Trains – shinkansen – are justifiably world famous for their speed and amazing punctuality. I've had occasion to ride them several times in the last month or so, once to visit a friend, and twice for concerts, so I thought I'd share a few images, mostly of the (rather unremarkable) view inside.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — 1/80 sec, f/3.5, ISO 250 — full exif
View from Car #14, Seat 5A
The model of train shown in these pictures a “Type 700”, which is the most recent model, but old enough that Anthony already has a toy version (the solid yellow one seen in the Playrail Train Set post earlier this month). Even better, Anthony's is a “Dr. Yellow” Type 700; The “Dr Yellow” trains are the passenger-less testing/diagnostic trains that run the tracks a few times each month.
There must be a hundred individual trains, in a dozen or so different models, on the tracks at any one time. Most have 16 very long cars, meaning that the entire train is about a quarter mile long (although it feels much longer when you see one pull out of the station, because it seems to never end).
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 28mm — 1/160 sec, f/5, ISO 640 — full exif
Legroom is Generous
– perfect for a snooze or some light reading –
The ride is utterly, perfectly, smooth, except for a slight jolt when two trains pass each other. When a train going one direction at 270kph passes another going the same speed, their bow waves hit at about 340 miles an hour, which is bound to give each car a bit of a sideways jolt.
You can walk the entire length of the train if you've got the energy. There are food cars, phones, vending machines, and even little smoking rooms for the poor slob who gets stuck in a non-smoking car and can't survive a whole two hours without his cancer stick.
There are, of course, bathrooms no more than a car or two away.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — 1/20 sec, f/4.5, ISO 640 — full exif
End-of-Car Bathroom Area
vanities on the left, bathrooms on the right