Anthony graduated from elementary school today, a big event in Japanese culture. I snapped the photo as we were heading to the school for the last time.

It reminds me of this photo of the two of them from the day he started elementary school half his life (six years) ago, and also the post about his going to school on his own for the first time. He's growing up all too quickly.

Today I'm sharing the first results from “Photo-Development Challenge: Inspire Me and Others With Your Artistic Interpretation”. Today's photo is one of some minor outlying buildings at the Yoshiminedera Temple (善峯寺) in Kyoto, Japan.

First, let's look at the uninspiring original:

This was from a productive outing four years ago that produced “Temple Hopping in the Mountains of South-Western Kyoto”, two examples for “Heading Out To Photograph The Fall Foliage? Don’t Forget The Polarizer Filter”, and an item on “Visiting My Photo Archives: Random Pretty Shots #1”.

For lack of a better idea, I'll present the various results in the order I received them, starting with my own interpretation that I apparently did when I was considering to post it four years ago:

The only change is the white-balance setting, though the impact is substantial. When writing a blog post about some place I've visited, I usually think of photos in terms of documenting the experience, and so I guess I didn't do much. (Often I'll do a lot to a photo, but perhaps because I ended up not including this one in a blog post, I didn't give it much critical thought.)

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Werner comments:

My Reaction: This feels more pleasing than mine, with a white balance that feels more realistic. (The white balance from mine was set via a color-checker sample, which makes it perhaps “correct” but not necessarily pleasing.)

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Ben comments:

My Reaction: Love the whys and the whats, and the result is impactful. The lower of the two buildings feels like it's popping out of the screen.

I like it a lot.

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Daniel comments:

My Reaction: This is almost haunting, and the B&W treatment gives it an “old” look. The artificial-horizon idea is neat, though perhaps a bit too strong for my tastes, but it's hard to judge on its own merits because our view is tainted by having seen other versions.

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Austen didn't provide a comment, but I can see in Lightroom that he cropped it a bit, and painted in some very subtle darker exposure here and there. He did a lot with the tone curve (adjusting how dark darks are, how middle middles are, etc.) and reduced saturation. He even added a bit of grain.

The result is a kind of “old” like the B&W one above, yet a completely different kind of old. It's almost like a “colorized” B&W shot. It feels much more calm and peaceful than “impactful”.

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I didn't get as many submissions for this photo as some of the others, but I picked this one to start because the various versions are so very different — each person went for a completely different vibe — so it really makes me appreciate the exercise.

My thoughts on the artificial horizon highlight something important, though difficult, to keep in mind: comparing and contrasting different versions is explicitly not what we do with most photos... as consumers of others' imagery, we generally only see the final product with eyes untainted by other versions or possibilities.

Had Daniel's version with the dark horizon been the only view I had of this photo, I perhaps wouldn't have even noticed the artificial horizon, much less thought it was a bit too dark. It's impossible to know.

I gave some thought to having the images presented randomly for each viewer, so that not everyone's view is modified in the same way. Had I done this, folks who happened to see the dark-horizon version first may well have thought the next one they saw too garish, like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. The order things are presented in can really matter.

In any case, I really appreciate the four submissions, both individually and as a group. I hope we'll see similar quality for the other photos in the challenge!

I'm going to be traveling for the rest of the month, so it'll likely be a while before I get to the next photo, so if you're considering to participate, you've still time.

Continued here...

水曜日もサイクリングをしました。今回は友達６人と一緒に６０kmの山上下いっぱいのルートでした。

Two days ago I did a short easy bicycle ride into the mountains of western Kyoto, but yesterday I did something a bit more ambitious. As seems to be the habit since my first ride with folks from Cycling Kyoto!, we met in front of the Starbucks on Sanjo Street. This time there were seven people total...

Today's route would be a repeat of one that Manseki had done two days prior, so he was group lead. We got moving at 9:20.

We spent the first 45 minutes heading east on Route 1. The route looks horrible in the photo, but the cycling was fairly smooth and easy, without the stop and go of city traffic. I was surprised at how not unfun it was.

That first 45 minutes involved 350m of vertical gain, but it was spread out over 15km, so it was a relaxed ride and we all stuck together. Then we turned south along a river and was greeted by a bit nicer scenery...

An hour into the ride, we stopped by a cafe for a quick tea, but ended up eating and chatting for almost an hour.

I thought the rack for kickstand-less bicycles was ingenious, and I never would have realized what it was for without seeing it in use.

Perhaps because we were a big group, or perhaps because they're cyclist friendly or just nice, they gave us some sweets on the house...

This stuff was great... it's mochi (like I made the other day), with brown sugar and cashews. Highly recommended. The cafe is next to the entrance to the splendid Ishiyama-dera Temple (which I've written about in the past), so if you make a visit to the temple, avail yourself of the chance for some of these tasty sweets.

I ended up buying a bunch to bring home, adding to the weight that I would have to pedal up the mountains when we left.

On the way out of the parking lot, I snapped a quick shot of the temple gate...

15 minutes later, we were finally heading into the mountains for the first (and biggest) of four major climbs...

10 grueling minutes and 140m of elevation gain later, I had arrived at the spot Manseki had said is “where the tough part starts”. Crap, I was already ready for it to end! 🙂

I stopped for a rest, and to enjoy some of the 2.5kg of sports drink I'd bought at the convenience store just before starting the climb. I also removed my already-drenched-with-sweat jacket, sweater, and gloves, and shoved them into my pannier:

I have no idea how I got in front of Manseki, but he likely either had stopped for something, or was just pacing himself smarter than I was, because he came riding past while I was resting....

After a three-minute rest, I headed back up. The slopes were as unrelenting as they were ridiculous, continuing without respite. I had to laugh (figuratively... I didn't have the energy to do so literally) at this scene:

Seven minutes and 64m of elevation gain later, I finally joined the rest of the group at the top, interrupting their long rest... Henry (and others, I'm sure) had made it 10 minutes before me.

The ride up involved 286m of elevation gain in 2.8km (an average slope of 10.3%). It took me 25 minutes, four of which were resting.

Going down was easier, but three more big ascents awaited.

I headed down a bit before everyone else and set up to take pictures of folks as they went past, but it was a mostly wasted effort because I screwed up focus. I seem to have zero ability to learn the focus modes of the camera beyond the basic “S” mode. I thought I had “C” mode down, but the results below are a clear indication that I don't. 🙁

私は先に降りて、途中で止まって、カメラを準備しょました。皆の写真を撮ったが、ピンはかなり間違いました。 🙁

The second ascent was longer (3.1km) but less elevation gain (238m), but it was 23 minutes of pain for me.

The third ascent was insane... 118m of elevation gain over just 880m of distance (an average slope of over 12%). It took me 7½ minutes.

Having followed the others the whole time, I had no idea where I was beyond “mountains south-east of Kyoto”, but just before the pass I was surprised to come across a scene I recognized immediately:

アッ、この神社を見た事ある、４年前。

Apparently I hadn't posted any photos from that 2011 visit, but the photos from “Slightly Mysterious Stairs Into Mountain Overgrowth” came from a short distance away, just beyond the pass I would reach in 30 seconds..

That early-summer outing in 2011, with Paul Barr and Katsunori Shimada, produced a bunch of posts, including

• What It Looks Like When Tiered Rice Paddies Go to Seed
• Pleasant Little Village in Uji
• Pleasant Little Village in Uji, Part 2
• Uji-City Rural Mountain Drive #2: Ice-Cream Girl, Fruit Pizza, and More
• Some Random Japan Desktop Backgrounds From the Past Year
• More Thin Depth Of Field: Retrospective on My First Months with a 300mm f/2

Anyway, I soon arrived at the top:

I probably looked worse than I felt, but I was pooped and appreciative of the guilt-free rest.

As comparison, here's a photo of a somewhat more portly me, four years ago at the shrine near the pass:

I was using the aforementioned Nikkor 300mm f/2 to take this photo:

Anyway, back to yesterday's ride. On the ride down to the next valley, Manseki asked me to go ahead and set up to take a shot of him coming around the corner...

As my lens followed him around the corner and off into the distance, it came across an unexpected sight...

It turns out that she's an acquaintance of Manseki. As I'd been getting ready for Manseki to come around the corner, she'd ridden up from below, and greeted me with “are you Manseki's friend?”. She'd seen the others ride past, and perhaps had known about our plans(?), so just took a guess.

She decided to turn around and join us for a while.

The final ascent was the “easiest” (if one could say that) of the four... 250m of elevation gain over 3.4km. Again I was the last one... it took me 21 minutes.

Ms. Yoshino turned around to continue her original route, and we headed down. There was one more “mini” ascent (112m gain over 1000m)...

The final big downhill was fantastic, with wide sweeping curves that one could take almost wide open. I hit 62km/h (38mph) at one point. It was fun.

Another 13km of city riding and we were back where we started.

Overall the day's 58km route was tough for me, but still much easier than my 90km route three weeks ago, which had almost double the elevation gain, plus snow.

Still, I was surprised when I asked Henry how the route was compared to whatever he normally does. He said “Today's ride was nice, though the pace was...... relaxed.” Doh! But sure, he got to lounge around all day waiting for me at the top of each ascent, so who wouldn't be relaxed. 😉

Today I went out for a short, mostly-easy bicycle ride (track at Strava) with Manseki Kanemitsu, another member of the Cycling Kyoto! group on Facebook. Rain was forecast for the late afternoon so it was just us.

It was my first real ride since the grueling 90km mountain/snow adventure three weeks ago, and my third “real” ride in total, since my inaugural ride a month and a half ago.

(We're planning to do a more ambitious ride tomorrow with a larger group, so that'll be ride #4.)

We decided to head off to the Arashiyama area of western Kyoto, which unfortunately involves a lot of city riding just to get there.

We stopped by a tofu shop whose owners he was friends with, noted because they are perhaps the last shop in Kyoto sill use the old-style wood-burning hearth that I've often seen in old temple kitchens, but have never actually seen in use...

Off we continued toward Arashiyama...

The guy performing devotions alternated between praying in front of the waterfall, and dipping into the cold water. It was quite cold, so I'm sure he was freezing, but that was likely the point.

I'd prefer to come in the summer when one could cool down after the ride up.

I grabbed a quit snapshot of Manseki...

... and he of me...

Where we took the tunnel on the way in, on the way back we wanted to take the short (but insanely steep) road over the mountain, but it turns out we couldn't.

There's a side road that goes up for a short distance... it gains 28m of elevation in about 150m of distance... a ridiculous 18% average grade. Here we're headed back down:

Sections were so steep that my front tire would come up with every downstroke of the pedal, threatening to have me fall backwards off the face of the road. Luckily this section was short.

Even though they're not a Yuba shop, I thought they might have some as a natural byproduct of making tofu, and I scored some that they were willing to sell me. We had it with dinner tonight and it was fantastic. Next is to try the tofu, perhaps for breakfast prior to tomorrow's tougher ride...

I've had my Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens (seen here) for more than eight years. I don't use it all that much anymore because for the last few years I've tended to prefer faster prime lenses, but it's a great lens for many situations.

I'm pretty tough on my gear... I don't baby it, I use it, and this lens is no exception. In particular, after using it all day in heavy snow five years ago (“First Look at Snowy Shirakawago Village”), the zoom became a bit less smooth. It wasn't so bad that it was worth the bother of having it serviced, but it was a slight inconvenience I lived with for years.

Fast forward to a few months ago and it suddenly started getting stuck while zooming... I couldn't zoom out past a certain point. It was hitting a hard stop, as if a bolt had been placed to stop the zoom. The problem came and went... when it came, I found that I could usually unstick things by jiggling the lens, or turning it sideways, or something... I never knew what would get it to work, beyond “futzing with it until it zooms again”, sometimes for several minutes. It was a major inconvenience when I was shooting the big new-year's storm at 3am (“Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow”), so I knew I needed to finally get it fixed.

Thinking to bring the lens on my upcoming across-the-country RV trip, I checked Nikon's service website and found that the estimation to fix a troublesome zoom was US$800(!). This is probably for the worst-case scenario... having to replace the guts of the zoom... but mine probably needed only a little TLC. They didn't have a pricepoint listed for “a little TLC”, so I was reticent to send it in.

So, I decided to open it up and fix it myself.

Three resources really helped:

• This YouTube video: Nikon 24-70 f2.8 Zoom Ring Fix Repair.
• One of the comments on that video: this one, by David Dietrich, starting out “THIS IS THE WRONG PROCEDURE!”.
• The Nikon Nikkor 24-70 repair manual, a link provided in David's comment.

The comment by David Dietrich is painful to read because of his writing style (he comes across like a real jerk), but the information is accurate and invaluable.

In the end, what I did was quite simple...

After using an X-Acto knife to remove a thin glued-on ring that covered the edge around the end of the lens, I was left with the three exposed screws seen in the opening photo.

Removing the three screws (all while leaving the lens covered with a lens-cleaning cloth, as minor insurance) lets the filter-holder pop off, yielding six more screws:

In the shot above, notice that three of the screws are recessed, while the three that are not have some kind of smudge next to them. The smudge is likely Loctite, indicating that those screws should not be removed without a very explicit need. This is where the video made a mistake, which the comment corrected.

With that understanding, I removed the three recessed screws, and the whole front-element unit popped out, leaving the hollow center of the lens open to access:

I applied tiny dabs of silicone grease to the grooves.

結局、美味く修理を出来ました。怖かったけれども。

I would have liked to used lithium grease, but I couldn't find mine, so I went with what I had. I put the six screws and the little cover ring back, and it zoomed just fine. Not “good as new” fine — I have a feeling that lithium grease would have been better — but good enough.