Anthony turned five years old today.
Like last year, he picked out his own present. This year it was a little train set...
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 26mm — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 320 — full exif
Checking out the Train
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — 1/125 sec, f/3.5, ISO 160 — full exif
Stationmaster Included
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 40mm — 1/45 sec, f/4, ISO 400 — full exif
“Happy Birthday Anthony”
In the picture above, I like the perspective of the candles and how they rise out of the focus into the blur.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 34mm — 1/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — full exif
There Seems to be More Candles Every Year
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — 1/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — full exif
Cleaning up the Five
(having forgotten to blow it out with the rest of the candles moments ago)
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — 1/80 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — full exif
Cleaning up the Five
Now that they're out, the candles are just impediments to CAKE
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — 1/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 400 — full exif
Uncle Shogo Cuts The Cake
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 28mm — 1/60 sec, f/4.5, ISO 400 — full exif
Sharing a Silly Time with Obaa-chan
There were lots more silly times and more presents, but we'll save those for another post or two....
Origami “Bobblehead” Puppy
Anthony played with an older friend the other day, who made for him some origami puppies (origami being the Japanese art of paper folding). They were adorable, all the more so because their heads bobbled in the breeze like a bobblehead doll.
Made from two sheets of paper, the head is balanced on a point, and hence the bobble....
The Source of the Bobble
“I am Cuteness, Worship Me”
Top View
One you have the basic concept down, you can make adjustments to the body and head and end up with a whole pack of different puppies, each with their own personality.
(The one with the lobster shirt is not origami, but an actual little boy who turns five tomorrow.)
By the way, the answer to yesterday's quiz is that it's the bottom of a compact flash card. (Congratulations Michael and Peter; Nils, I hope you're not hungry.) It's at 5× on-sensor magnification, 60% more magnification than the 3× seen in my recent post about macro photography. The holes are at an 0.05-inch pitch (that is, center-to-center is 1/20th of an inch). That means that the width of the image represents about a fifth of an inch — less than 5mm
When the full-resolution image is viewed on my high-resolution monitor, that 1/20th-of-an-inch becomes about 10½ inches, yielding a magnification of about 45,200 times. Cool.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 28mm — 1/320 sec, f/8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
(Insert Your Caption Here)
This is a new house a short distance from my place that I marvel at every time I go by, for any number of reasons.
You can see the shape of the previous building that was on the site by the roofline-marks left on the walls of the adjacent buildings. It's not uncommon for buildings to attach that way, which I can't understand because if I had a building, I couldn't imagine liking someone attaching to it.
In looking at the parking lot in front of the house, I can make a guess as to what's going on (but it's only a guess): the land owner might have been limited by zoning in how much of the land could be covered by a building, and so rather than waste the uncovered space with a useless garden or an ugly tree, he turned it into a pay-by-the-hour parking lot (that can hold three whole cars!) to try to offset his fantastically huge mortgage.
That's my guess, but I'm not wholly confident in it because it's a major business area, so I'd expect zoning to allow 100% building coverage (as the buildings on either side are doing). So, it may well be that the limitation the land-owner faced was in the finances to build a bigger house, and so faced with a smaller house, he decided to put the rest of the land to financially-productive use.
Or, it could have been.... well, this is Japan, so probably anything.
When I took this photo, the parking lot stuff had just been installed and wasn't yet working, which is why the spots are coned off.
These kind of short-term parking lots are extremely common. I've seen them as small as two spots, and as large as 20 or 30. They're generally called “100-yen parking” because prices are usually quoted in how many minutes 100 yen will get you. The spots in this picture will go for 100 yen per 20 minutes (a rate of US$2.60/hour) during the day, and 100 yen/hour during the night.
(More commonly these days, rather than 100 yen for 15 minutes, they'll do 200 yen for half an hour, which means they get double the money for a quick five-minute stop.)
The spots have sensors, and a minute or two after a car pulls in, a big plate moves up to block the tires from leaving until the spot is paid for. The ones here are orange.
Another interesting tidbit is that because the path from the road to the front door of the house takes away a tiny corner of the parking lot, the rightmost space had to be shortened, and is marked “compact.” The price is the same, though.
So, how would you caption this photo? Certainly, anything you come up with will be more witty than what I could scrounge up....
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 36mm — 7.2 sec, f/4.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
The Five-Storied Pagoda on Miyajima
One of the landmarks on Miyajima, Japan, besides the main gate of the Itsukushima Shrine (厳島神社、宮島), is a five-story tall pagoda called, unimaginatively enough, “five-storied Pagoda” (In Japanese: 五重塔, gojyuunodou).
There are a number of large pagodas on the island, but this particular one is centrally located on relatively high ground, so it gets all the glory. You could see it in the background of the “Side View” photo on a recent post.
We didn't actually pay it a visit, but passed by enough that I ended up with plenty of pictures with it. Here it's sort of peeking out from behind some foreground trees in an area that had a quaint feeling at night.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 26mm — 16 sec, f/4.5, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
City Street on Miyajima
There's something about the cute little car sticking out at right, with the old fashioned mailbox next to it (the orange, cylindrical thing) that I find quite appealing.
The little area lost much of its charm in the light of day, but was still sufficiently enjoyable during a morning stroll....
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 18mm — 1/1250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Passing back through the area after hiking Mt. Misen that afternoon, we ran into others who thought the old mailbox was quaint.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 52mm — 1/60 sec, f/9, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Japanese Bride and Groom
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 150mm — 1/125 sec, f/9, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
All Smiles
This next shot is fairly uninteresting, except that it shows the two Aussies in silly hats, one of which was thanked on the Mt. Misen post for taking our picture.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 18mm — 1/640 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Most of the wires across the sky are to support sun shades that are deployed on hot sunny days. A number of streets in the area have them, which we appreciated earlier in the day when it was actually sunny and hot.
The building center-left, by the way, is a restaurant whose food is both tasty and quite reasonably priced.
Here's a stylized picture of the pagoda that I created by bumping up the color saturation. Due to the wide-angle lens and this view's framing, it's a bit distorted, much like this picture of Anthony.
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR @ 28mm — 1/200 sec, f/7.1, ISO 250 — map & image data — nearby photos
Vivid
Here's the view from the boat as we left, from half a mile away. The “small stone gate” from the Paths and Gates post is at the far right....
Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — 1/320 sec, f/6.3, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Parting View