Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/800 sec, f/6.3, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
This Pretty Much Sums it Up
(ninety seconds later, powerful wind and rain slammed into us)

We took a short trip over the New Year holiday to the Amami Islands of southern Japan, in the East China Sea about halfway between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland.

The map below shows our flight back, from the northern part of the main Amami island (circled in green) to Osaka (circled in blue). Mentally, Amami feels much further away than Hokkaido (circled in Red) where we visited last May, even though the latter is indeed farther away.

When we went to Hokkaido, we took an 18-hour ferry trip, but were almost always within sight of land. The flight back from Amami was just an hour and fifteen minutes (about 575 miles), but it felt further away. Perhaps it's that great expanse of water in between.

Arriving on the afternoon of December 30th set the tone for the entire trip: landing at Amami airport, already over the runway and just inches from touching down, the pilot decided that it was too windy to risk a landing and jammed the throttle to maximum power. I've probably been on about 350 flights, but it was my first go around (aborted landing).

Once we got our rental car and started driving around, we found out how stupendously windy it really was (a subject I post about here).

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — ¹/160 sec, f/5, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
So Much For The Tropical-Island Sunset

The map below shows the main Amami Island (Amami Ooshima – “Amami Big Island”) outlined in red, and the other island we visited on the trip, Kakeroma-jima, outlined in purple. We spent the first two days in the north-east of the main island, exploring where Fumie's grandmother was born and lived until about the start of WWII. We then spent two days on the other island.

The two islands are virtually completely covered in mountains, and due to their cragily shape seem to be nothing more than mountains and endless fractaled coastline. The main one has an area of 275 square miles, but its shape and the lack of straight roads makes it feel much larger. There are about 80,000 people living on it, the vast majority living in Naze (pronounced nah-zeh).

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/750 sec, f/8, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Chilly, Windy, Dynamic

The theme of the trip was “if you don't like the weather, wait a minute.” It might be brilliantly sunny one moment, with driving wind and rain the next. This made for perfect rainbow conditions, and we saw more rainbows during this trip than perhaps I'd seen in my entire life up to that point.

We had a wonderful time.

The innumerable beaches that ring the islands all seem to have their own character, with wildly different water colors and sand. One in particular, Honohoshi Beach, has smooth round rocks instead of sand, which for some reason makes for a very interesting and highly relaxing sound when the water of a wave recedes...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 44mm — ¹/350 sec, f/4, ISO 160 — map & image data — nearby photos
Soaking Up The Sounds At Honohoshi Beach

The 20-minute ferry ride between islands was at a gloomy, windy, rainy time...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/250 sec, f/5.6, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Between Islands

The first full day on the second island had marginally better weather, but everything seemed more sunny because of Hirozou Yasuda, a wonderful guide that Fumie had arranged for. He drove us around all day and treated us to all kinds of wonderful sites/sights we'd have never found on our own...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/750 sec, f/7.1, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Guide Hirozou Yasuda and Fumie

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/500 sec, f/9, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Taking Advantage of Some Sun

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/250 sec, f/10, ISO 160 — map & image data — nearby photos
View While Having Lunch On Day 4
minutes before heavy wind and rain slammed into us

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/1250 sec, f/4, ISO 160 — map & image data — nearby photos
Eerily Emerald
(and although it's hard to tell in the picture, there's a touch of rainbow left of center)

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/160 sec, f/13, ISO 160 — map & image data — nearby photos
The Calm Before the Storm
Two minutes later – you guessed it – heavy wind and rain slammed into us.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 22mm — ¹/5000 sec, f/3.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Sort of a Sunset

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 48mm — ¹/500 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Later, From Our Lodge
on the other side of the island

Weather was a central theme because most of our time was outdoors, but there's so much more to our trip that I want to share that I've yet to even touch on, so I hope to be able to post more in the future.

Just before leaving on this trip, we had a traditional New-Year's lunch with Fumie's brother, Fumie's mom, and her mom's mom (Fumie's Dad was in Malaysia on business). Her mom's mom – her grandma – was born in Amami and lived there until her mid teens. At that lunch before we left, we spent a pleasant afternoon looking at maps and satellite photos, coaxing as much from Grandma's memory as 65 years of absence would allow. She's had slight Alzheimer's for the past few years, but the topic of Amami seemed to bring somewhat of a spark.

Sadly, upon our return on the 3^rd we found out that she suffered a stroke while we were away, and that her prognosis isn't particularly good. Fumie brought some of the photos from our trip to the hospital today to show her. It's unclear whether she recognized anything that was happening, but Fumie's mom said that she seemed a bit better than yesterday, so that's hopeful.

Alexander Kiel's has developed some insight into the “FormatMessageW failed” error that plagues some Windows users of Lightroom export plugins, including my export plugins for Zenfolio, SmugMug, Flickr, and Picasa Web. From his reports, the problem seems to be related to IE7 and slow internet connections.

He poses a potential solution, so those running into this error are encouraged to see his writeup on the subject.

I'm trying a new look for my blog....

OLD:
NEW:

It's a look that I hope is more suitable for the photo-heavy content I tend to produce, and lighter and simpler overall.

I've been working on it for the last month or so. Having not really grasped the essential nature of how to use CSS (style sheets) for a long time, my years of content developed a hodge-podge of style markups that changed over time as both my knowledge of CSS and my sense of aesthetics changed.

It was a monumental task to go over all the older posts to try to tidy them up so that they'd at least look okay with the new style. Most were fine, but I had a fair number of specialty posts (like this one) with screenshots that appeared to float above the greenish background I was using at the time, with a drop shadow and all the trimmings. These were not at all amenable to changing the background color, so I had to visit each one and try to fix it the best I could.

The proper solution for these kind of “blend into the background” images is for me to create PNG format images, which allow true transparency. I did this for one of the floating images on a recent post, but it often comes at the high price of a substantially larger image size. That's why I didn't do it for the images on today's post: it would have increased the size of each threefold.

Anyway, I hope you find the new color scheme appealing; it was so much work to change it the first time that I hope to never have to do it again! 😀

Our New Year's Card

We just back from a five-day trip to Amami-Ooshima (an island in the south of Japan). While waiting for 858 photos I took to process, I thought I'd post our 2007 Christmas / 2008 New Year's card (nengajou – 年賀状). It features a photo we took with a tripod here in Kyoto, and the family picture that Anthony was commissioned to draw.

For reference, here is a link to last year's and the year before's, and a short introduction to Japanese New Year's Cards that I wrote a couple of years ago.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/250 sec, f/2.5, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Red Berries of Some Sort

Winter is fairly blah in Kyoto, color/nature-wise. Kyoto is glorious in autumn and glorious during cherry-blossom season, hellatiously hot and humid in summer, and blah in winter. But one thing it has in winter are red berries of all sorts.

While walking back from the shrine-closing ceremony in mid-November, I noticed some berries growing wild by a small river...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 105mm — ¹/350 sec, f/4.5, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Red Berries of Some Sort

Since then, I've started to see them all over, whether in small plants, on shrubs, or in trees. Here's an old house fronting the river, with large bushes of red berries flanking on either side....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/640 sec, f/2.8, ISO 800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Red Berries and Some Shorts

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Red Berries in Some Shrubs
In front of Kyoto's Nijo Castle

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/750 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Big Bunch of Red Berries

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — ¹/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
(Same bunch as above, from the side)

Now that I think about it, I posted some red berries last year as well.

Anyway, I wanted to end the year with something colorful. We'll be spending the New Year on an island in the south of Japan, so I'll not be posting for the next week.

My blog this year rounds out with 330 posts, of which 289 had photos (1,768 photos: see the index of photos appearing in 2007 to browse them). It'll be interesting to see what next year holds...