The other day I did some photos with Ikuko-san, the friend we saw quite differently last month in “An Apprentice-Geisha Photoshoot Quite Unlike Any Other”. This time we could see her normal self.

この間北野天満宮で育子さんという友達と一緒撮影をしました。（先月、このブログでは育子さんの節分の「変身」をみました、本格的な舞妓になる事でした。）

You'll perhaps recognize this scene from last month's “The Many Lanterns and Overwhelming Sumptuousness of the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine”. She, too, was drawn to the many lanterns...

Before we got into the photography in earnest, she wanted to pay her respects (as described in the many-lanterns post).

And since we were at one of the best spots in Kyoto for plum blossoms, I felt obliged to snap one (but only one) blossom photo. Here it is:

The gardens were remarkably uncrowded, but I found someone to impose on to snap a photo of us. He knew he wasn't handy with the camera, so had his wife redo the shot when she came by, and it's a good thing because her shots were better. 🙂

The lady who took the photo was there with her family, so I snapped some photos of them. They were freakishly photogenic. I was so jealous. Just look:

I've since sent all the shots to the family, but I'll share one more here, my favorite, of the husband trying to coax his daughter to look at the camera. (Good luck with that.)

Later I noticed Grandma off camera had the toddler's attention, so as per the lesson about kid photography I learned with my nieces and nephews, I quickly moved myself and the camera to be near Grandma, to take advantage of the child's attention focused in that general direction.

Back to Ikuko-san, one more photo before we end this part of the story...

Continued here...
続きはこちらです。

It's been a week since my last post... where does the time go?

Well, yesterday a bit of it went into a photoshoot. This is not really one of my “What am I?” quizzes, but do you recognize her from when she appeared on my blog in the past?

Continued here...

Continuing with last fall's visit to Kyoto's visually-rich Seifuso Villa (清風荘), where the last installment (“From the Garden to the House at the Seifuso Villa”) left us finally inside the main house that has gone mostly unseen so far except for its photogenic entrance foyer.

The grounds are opened to the public for a few days every year or two, but the house is not normally open to the public at all, so it was a wonderful opportunity to have an unrestricted tour.

The photo above is a 9-image panorama that you can scroll from side to side. It's got quite a bit of geometric distortion that I wish I could have corrected, but it's not bad for the amount of work I put into it (which is almost none: I selected the photos in Lightroom, invoked “Merge as Panorama in Photoshop”, and it did what it wanted. I made one small touch-up to the result, and here we are.)

A section of this tabletop is the item in the other day's A Red, Squiggly, Fairly Blotchy “What am I?” Quiz. Unfortunately, nobody got it right. I was hoping someone would be able to tell me how the red squiggly blotches came to be. The tabletop was perfectly smooth, so I'm sure a lot of sanding was involved.

Another upstairs room with an equally-impressive view had two of the same table. Here's a wigglegram showing the view:

If this looks familiar it's because one of the frames appeared in an article a couple of months ago, at the start of this post.

夕べ、友達と一緒に京都東山花灯路を見に行きました、６年ぶりで。光源と影の間の明るさが大きすぎたので、撮影がなかなか難しかったです。

Yesterday after seeing the plum blossoms in the Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, I made a trip out to see the annual Kyoto Higashiyama Lightup. It was the first time since 2008, when I posed a report in two parts.

As I tried to take photos, I remembered why I skipped it all these years... the difference between the dark of the evening and the brightness of the lanterns and other displays is just way too much for a camera to do anything reasonable with, unless you move to HDR and its often unearthly results. (Unearthly results can be quite stunningly good, as Trey Ratcliff often shows, but it's not really my cup of tea.)

I did bring my big tripod with me, but didn't use it all that much because I'm just too lazy. The photos reflect that laziness, with a lot of mushy softness due to slow shutters, high ISO, and heavy noise reduction in Lightroom. The lead photo above was so mushy that in order to (perhaps) recover something useful from it, I pushed the mushiness further and added some grain. I guess I must like the result, since I'm leading with it.

My evening started at the Chion'in Temple where I met some friends. This is the temple undergoing roof repairs that I recently wrote about. Since I had the tripod with me, I tried a crisp photo of its main gate (which I also wrote about recently, here)...

They had some kind of “light projection” artistic event going on inside, and the line to get in was huge...

(You can't tell in the crappy photo above, but the path is quite nice, as seen here.)

As I waited for friends, I filled my time with the camera...

We then made our way to the Shouren'in Temple, often seen on my blog due to the flower-arranging show they have every year (pics: 2013, 2012).

Lanterns along a wall across from the temple (at a condo, which is actually where I lived when I first moved to Kyoto):

Facing the wall, between it and the temple proper, are several 800-year-old camphor trees. They're very hard for me to photograph for some reason, but perhaps one is because the utility wires cutting through just destroy it for me.

Over in Maruyama Park they had all kinds of various displays, many the same as I showed six years ago. A new display had a bunch of light cylinders on which people could put blossom-shaped papers with their wish written...

When I walked up to them and saw that the blossom-shaped papers had writing, the very first text I noticed was a wish that stock prices end high. The one immediately below it asked for happiness for all the world....

Not really inspired by the technical difficulties in photographing such dark/bright scenes, I moved over to the little pond and tried some longish exposures of quite dark scenes...

Moving along...

The photo doesn't seem to capture it, but for some reason I really liked the modern stone lantern at the entrance to the Daiun-in Temple (大雲院). Its lighting was really well done, which certainly helped.

(The photos I took from the same spot in 2008 came out better; then I used the tripod, and a much longer lens.)

One could also look down onto a lane that sort of leads to the Kiyomizu Temple, which looks quite different now compared to six years ago...

Kyoto has slowly been trying to remove the ugly utility poles and wires. It's been eight years since the big construction in front of my place to make tunnels for the wires under the road, but the poles still remain. The effect when they're gone, as seen above, is almost surreal. Walking later on that road, I felt as if I was on a movie set.

On the way home, I passed through the Yasaka Shrine (quite a distance from, and perhaps unrelated to, the similarly-named pagoda seen above)...

I don't really care for the Yasaka Shrine, but I do like this path, which has appeared on my blog here and here.

今日は京都御所に寄って、軽い撮影をさせていただきました。

It's that time of year for blossoms of various sorts at Kyoto Gosho (the Imperial Palace Park). I've posted many times from there, including articles with an emphasis on the blossoms themselves and folks enjoying the blossoms and photos at 300mm and everything mixed together.

Today I knew a photographer friend was going to be there, so I stopped by for a bit while I was in the area on an errand.

Akiko is who I stopped by to say hi to. I'd met her a year and a half ago (during this outing) while she was on a visit to Kyoto, but she now lives here.

While chatting, I aimlessly took a photo of one of the blossoms to the left of her in the photo above, and it seemed to have come out okay. Here it is, direct out of the camera except for a slight white-balance adjustment, and a slight crop to fit a widescreen monitor...

To be continued...