at of flowers

The model will be familiar to you if you've seen older pictures here. It is going back in time a bit - the picture is from 2002. We had just found this cute hat at Fremont Sunday market and stopped at Starbucks for coffee. We had time, light was good, why not take some pictures?

house in kyoto

I'll continue posting pictures from Japan for a while. After all there are about 3000 to choose from. Much of the big number are random street shots with outcome of one reasonably interesting shot from 200 or so - but hey, that's the luxury of digital!

This wall belongs to a house in Kyoto, in Gion - the old city center and entertainment district. Tell me if I am wrong, but I think this house must be quite expensive. It looks this way because it wants to...

International

Same date and place as the previous shot... Although I've never published this one, I think they kind of belong together. There is a reason I haven't published it - I think it was a bit too straightforward in its original form. It may still be ;)
For more antique look, I've desaturated the colors to the point of almost black and white, then added a little contrast.
I tried playing with cropping too. It is way into the center, which I normally try to avoid. But when I cropped either side I liked it less. I think because the tractor is in fact not the main subject here... Is it?

• Camera: Canon EOS A2
• Lens: Canon USM 28-105, polarizer
• Exposure: unrecorded, handheld
• Film: Fujichrome 100
• Digital editing: saturation, contrast

daffodil field at mt.vernon, wa

This is a very old picture, from an early morning walk on my very first visit to Mt. Vernon (around 1994). One of the first I ever made digital too. It needed that - the light wasn't great and the original is pretty dark.

On that day I did get to the fields very, very early - just about sunrise. It did pay off - when I arrived there were just a few photographers walking around. An hour later it was full with people, no way to take a clear shot like this...

Shot data (amazingly, I did write it down!):

• Camera: Canon EOS A2
• Lens: Canon USM 28-105
• Exposure: 6 seconds, F/16
• Film: Fujichrome 100
• Digital editing: curves

musical shadows

20051123

I spied Seattle Chamber Players while they had their picture taken after a concert. The side view looked unusual - but it was dark and of three shots I had time to take only one was sharp, and it needed cropping too. In short it is really a stretch for the original (SD500 is a cool camera but it has top ISO of 400 and doesn't shoot RAW which limits possibilities in shots like this...).

ditch in nara, japan

yes, it is a ditch. what else can I say here? Of course no way I could get my head there to take aim so digital preview is a big help.

a few more Japan pictures coming...

merry-go-round in red and white

This is my selection from the walk in Seattle center on my first meeting with Seattle photobloggers. Four of us walked around in a cold cloudy afternoon... Clouds on Space Needle looked promising at first but changed to simply depressing when we arrived;)

In this picture I liked the composition (well, sort of) but the colors were not bright enough to make it fun and not subtle enough to not interfere with the shapes. So I stared with Photoshop: made color-range selection on dark-red color picked from one of the lamps, gave it a generous fuzziness of 100 to select most reds in the picture, bumped saturation for the reds, then inverted the selection and toned down saturation of the rest to almost nothing. Then in Picasa, tuned highlights to make the sky white (instead of realistic gray) and added the glow effect (which didn't make that much a difference, but smoothed the grain a little bit)

Original taken with Cannon SD500, ISO 400, 1/400s, f/13.

Mark has posted some cool pictures of us taking pictures - here

traffic at Tokyo fish market

20051118

This cart is the main transportation inside the market. They manage to quickly navigate narrowest passages, turn around and not hit each other or pedestrians or tourists (like me). Looking at the size of the passage it is hard to believe. But it works!

stone garden (detail)

20051115

for over 500 years these little stones are raked by somebody... perhaps every day...

as seen from shinkansen

20051117

shinjuku

20051023

"Twin Towers" of Tokyo - an administrative building (an equivalent of city hall I believe), with observation decks at the top.

ryoanji stone garden (kyoto)

20051114

this stone garden is considered the most famous Zen garden anywhere. it has 15 stones, but there is no point from where all could be seen at once. there are many impretations... none is final... come and see for yourself ;)

when they say come early they mean it. 20 minutes after opening you'll see a school field trip.

stone garden maintenance

20051116

Fushimi Inari in Kyoto = "the path of 10000 gates"

tokyo crosswalk

20051112

update: I am submitting this as photofriday "Experimental" entry. It is in fact an experiment and it is ongoing. The broad idea is to convey movement in a static slow-exposure shot. Approach here is to shoot randomly at street scenes with semi-steady camera. I know I am not original in either but it was fun;)

octopus