Here are the picts from the 2nd day of our Culture Festival.

Bunkasai, 08/06/22

Here are some pictures from the first day of Nobetaka's Bunkasai (Culture Festival) '08:

Bunkasai '08 Day #1

We did a photowalk today in Miyazaki City...and being me, I decided to shoot using something I don't normally take with me...extreme macro.

The following pictures were all taken with a 100mm macro lens with a 25mm extension tube. Most of them 12/14 were taken using all 3 of my magnification filters on top of that. At F/8, we were looking at an in-focus range of about 1-2mm. Oh, and I handheld all of these. I am a God!

For a size perspective, the ring in 6283 is my wedding ring, and it one of the two taken *without* the mag filters.



Extreme Macro Photography

So there's this great waterfall just down the road from us, and I've never actually been....so last Sunday, Corey and I went a'climbin'. Corey decided to play "smack the rock" with his face, and I got pictures of that too :)

Mukabaki Falls

Here are the picts from the Kimono party in Nobeoka today. There are a lot, but these were more for the people involved than to showcase my photography.

Kimono Party

In Shanghai. My friend who lives there does event photography on the side, so the two of us teamed up and shot a couple of club events. The first was a fashion show for Guess? jeans, the 2nd was just a random night at a club where all the models and movie stars seem to hang out.

Guess? Party

Attica Mayday

Actually, the punishment for dealing in China is execution, so not so much....but here are the picts:

China - Shanghai and Hangzhou

The first one is a "day to night" conversion of the last one.

Japanese Cliffs at Night

The second one transports some Cambodian ruins to Nevada.
If you want to see the source plate, lemme know and I'll post it.

Cambodian Ruins

Ok, since it worked well, and gave me an ego boost, and 'cause it's dead slow here at work today, here's a second invisible matte painting based off my pictures from Okinawa.

Cliffside Temple

Here's the source:

Source picture

These are really too easy to do. It is kinda like applying the photoshop skills I learned with fashion models to terrain instead of faces. Still, the end result looks about 1000% better than my paintings ;)

An invisible matte painting is one where it looks just like reality - no Hudson River school stuff, nothing overly dramatic, just an attempt to recreate reality.

Takachiho-jo (Takachiho Castle)

Note: There is no Takachiho-jo in real life. Takachiho is the name of the town about 45km from Nobeoka where the background for this painting was shot. The castle is Shuri-jo in Okinawa.

If you're curious about the source plate, here it is:
Source plate

And here are some more touristy shots from our weekend. I didn't think people would really want to see 200 pictures of jungle vines, so I left the matte reference photos out ;) I didn't bring my mkII, so all these were shot with the point and shoot Olympus, apologies if you find the quality sub-par.

Naha City, Okinawa

I went along with the first graders today on their field trip of the local area. We went to Kitaura Fishing Port, Shiroyama Park (Shiro means castle, so literally, "Castle Mountain Park", site of the ruins of the samurai castle in Nobeoka), and to a Shochu (alcohol, kinda like Vodka) plant.

Lots of pictures of happy smiling students, mostly taken for them and for my teachers, not sure how interesting it will be to anyone else, but these are my kids, bless them all :) I only have them for another week, then they move up a grade and I get a new batch. They've been awesome, and I will really miss them.

Nobetaka Field Trip 08-03-12

The four main islands of Japan that is (Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido and Shikoku)

For my yearly trip with the English teachers, we went to Shikoku, Ehime Prefecture. Matsuyama, the capital (and where we visited) is famous for it's castle, and the fact that it has the oldest onsen (hot spring bath) in Japan. Being Japanese people, my teachers think nothing about driving for 4 hours to take a bath in a room that looks just like the room they normally take a bath in ;) It was a nice onsen, but very crowded, and indoors, so you really are just looking at 4 wooden walls, much like anywhere else you'd go.

The castle was cool, we took a chair lift up to the top of the mountain and then walked around the building. It's not quite as spectacular as nijo-jo in Kyoto, but you are allowed to take pictures inside, which was a bonus :)

On the ferry ride over, I took a ton of pictures that I will hopefully use for reference material for matte paintings...not posting those, 'cause how many "tree covered island" shots do you guys really want to see? *grin*

Here are the photos from the trip:

Nobetaka English Department 2008 retreat

So this coming Saturday is Graduation for my school....which, by the twisted logic of Japanese education, meant that I had today off. I went out Rt. 218 towards Takachiho, taking pictures of rivers and mountains for use in matte paintings.

This one kinda assembled itself. The foreground and background are different photos, and I painted the trees.

Mountain Trail

I'm going to finish the waterfalls tomorrow.

By which I mean, Hokkaido, the northern island in Japan. This last weekend was a 3 day weekend in Japan, and we went up to Sapporo to see the Snow Festival. The temperature hovered at just below freezing, and the weather on Saturday and Sunday was clear. Monday, it clouded over and snowed a bit more, but hey, that's kinda cool when you go to a snow festival, right?

So, those of you who have been to Japan probably know this, but for the rest of you - Japanese girls have what I would describe as a "bad" sense of fashion....they either look frumpy as hell, or like the trashiest of street walkers. Seriously. Forget Harajuku, that's not real Japanese fashion, those are the nerd-girls that get beat up in school. When I went to Jakarta last summer, the actual hookers looked less like hookers than the girls I see in big cities, particularly during festivals. Coochie shorts are the word of the day.

Also - Japanese women tend to have short, stumpy legs. Many of them hide this by losing incredible amounts of weight (Japan leads the world in anorexia), but nonetheless, they have what is typically described as "Daikon legs." Daikon is a big, fat radish btw.

Combine coochie shorts with daikon legs, and you have the anti-reeces pieces: Two bad tastes that taste bad together.

When we arrived at the airport in Sapporo on Saturday night, we started counting the number of "Dai-ta" girls we saw. What, you may ask, is a dai-ta? Well, Japanese people are also famous for creating short forms of words, things like "pursu-con" for "personal computer", or my favorite, "rori-con" for "Lolita Complex". Dai-ta is our attempt to join the fun, shortening "Daikon-legged retard" to "Daikon 'tard" to "dai-ta".

The rules for what qualifies as a dai-ta were simple: Any girl in shorts or a skirt at least 4 inches above her knee. No tights, but knee socks were acceptable. Keep in mind, it was BELOW FREEZING all weekend, and everyone was walking around looking at ice and snow sculptures outside.

In just over 24 hours, I spotted 94 dai-tas. I'm sure I would have found more, but I spent the last morning walking in an empty park taking pictures of snow.

(Incidentally, the male-equivalent to a dai-ta is a pi-he, or "Peacock Head" Vickie counted about 45 pi-hes during the same interval of time, so our dai-ta to pi-he ratio was just about 2:1.)

This has been your random update of Japanese culture.

Here are the pictures:

2008 Sapporo Yuki-Matsuri

You guys are awesome, thanks for the pick-me-up :)

Here's one where I wanted to work on my perspective drawing/painting. The entire foreground is created by me, and I didn't really change the background at all.

Japanese Garden

Again, this is a very simple novice-level exercise, and there are still problems with it. I have the damnedest time with edges and corners...I think the solution is in shadows, but I haven't found it yet.

Ok, I was still annoyed by "Indian Dirt" and the way the foreground mounds looked, so I went back and adjusted it...I also used a reference photo for the background mountain (hell, I took it, I can use it if I want to!)

Indian Dirt 2

Much happier with this version.

Ok, here's another very simple matte, mostly just so I can practice sitting things into the painting and have them look like they should be there.

Indian Dirt Mounds

I'm quite happy with the background mountain, the foreground dirt mounds are the right color balance (roughly), but I don't like their edges too much...not sure what to do to fix it tho.

So I was the official photographer for the wedding, 'cause he didn't want to spend $4000 on one ;) It was actually a lot of fun, the hotel he was married at took care of the posed boring stuff, so I just got to shoot like I wanted to :)

Hidaki's Wedding

It was a very Western wedding, which was ironic, 'cause people kept asking V and I what we thought of the "Japanese" style...we were like, "What, the Swiss Minister, the tuxes or the French food at the reception?"

*grin*

Remember, if it happens *in* Japan, it *is* Japanese.

Seen out front of a little store in 福岡 (Fukuoka).