Author: travel67

The Day After

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It’s been an strange day. Spent a lot of time switching between BBC World and CNN on the TV and various news sites on the web.  I saw the images coming in from photographers and journalist friends based in Tokyo, many of whom are now heading north to Sendai. I wish all the best to those who are going out to cover the disaster. Stay safe. The above photograph by my friend Damon Coulter shows a scene from Tokyo just after the quake. It is not an image of chaos or carnage, but a man putting his training into action. Japan is well aware it lies in an earthquake zone, and the precautions taken with regards to building design, planning and training mean things are much better than they could have been. I put up yesterday’s post with images of the tsunami’s effect on Okinawa hoping that it would be of interest to a few of my blog readers. The tsunami clearly didn’t have a large impact on Okinawa. The ocean appeared to go from …

Shuri Castle at Night

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Shuri Castle in Naha is still undergoing renovation. It looks like they are in the second of three stages, concentrating on the roof line and the golden dragons that sit at either end of the apex. You can just spot the scaffolding in the above photo. Here’s a crop from the  image at 100%. It’s nice to see they paint the scaffolding red, quite thoughtful really as the castle still gets many visitors while the reconstruction is going on.

Inked

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The Canon ipf5100 printer I use for creating my limited edition prints is fantastic. It uses the highest quality archival pigment inks, it takes rolls of paper rather than sheets allowing me to use the  thick cotton photo rag I love, and it produces images with great detail and wonderful color. It is, however, the size of a small piano and costs around 2000 dollars. As anyone with a exotic sports car will tell you,  the high initial cost is not the only concern, the running costs are just as significant an issue. The ipf series printers have two print heads and 12 ink cartridges. Print heads cost around 400 dollars each, and probably will last you several years. Ink cartridges are around 70 dollars each and their longevity will depend on a combination of how often you print and how often the printer needs to run the cleaning mode. If you are an occasional printer, this is going to make running the machine very expensive. Every time you turn on the printer it will …

Quick Release Danger

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I was out snorkeling a week ago and found this camera in amongst the coral. It’s a nice camera. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I’m a big fan of these waterproof shockproof point and shoots that can take a licking and keep on clicking. The problem is that this camera had been underwater for days if not weeks or even months. Water head leaked inside the body so that the camera no longer worked and the 8GB micro SD card inside was unreadable. As is probably clear from the photo (or the title of the blog) the culprit here is the ever so convenient quick release strap connector. The owner lost their camera and quite possibly all their photos from their holiday / honeymoon / deployment in Okinawa.  (If this is your camera please get in touch. I’ll hold onto the micro SD card so that if the owner does get in touch and wants to send the card to a data recovery specialist they can give it ago.) Which leads me to the …

Pentax 645D – Electronic Level Display

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Press the DISP button on the 645D camera and an Electronic Level Display appears on the rear monitor. It measures the degree of tilt both horizontally and vertically. Green means you’re level on a particular axis, then yellow bars show the level of tilt until you hit red. In the shot above you can see that the camera is angled approximately 3.5 degrees down on the vertical axis (7 yellow bars), and off the scale on the horizontal axis (red). Why is this a great thing to have? If you’d wanted the camera perfectly level when you took the photograph but found you had it angled, you will have to rotate and crop the image. Depending on the degree of tilt, this cropping will result in you having a smaller image to work with, or even losing part of the image. I use a ball head (rather than a pan head) with my tripod which means I will be using this feature a lot when shooting landscapes or cityscapes. I’m not saying all photographs should …

Namba in the Sunshine

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Shops in Japan often have cute animals enticing you to come and eat them. You don’t have to be a vegetarian to think it’s odd that you have cartoon cows munching down on a juicy steak. This stall was selling takoyaki (fried octopus balls). It looks like the cartoon octopus is whistling as he shuffles off to one side and makes his escape. Donkihote is a famous store in Namba named after Don Quixote / Don Quijote. Not sure why it got the name. The inside of the store was surprisingly unimpressive. Cramped and filled with stuff I didn’t want. (Yodobashi Camera or Bic Camera on the other hand…) Not sure what they do in Namba Hips. Best guess is that it is the international headquarters of the Shakira Fan Club.

Namba at Night

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Met up with American model Rachael while in Osaka to try and get some images of a person visiting the city, rather than shots of the locals. Namba really comes alive at night so the plan was to use the neon lights as a background and then illuminate the model with off camera flash. It turns out that the male hosts of Dotomburi were fascinated with what we were doing, so they ended up in the shoot too. And finally a shot of Flickr friend Jan Moren who assisted me on the shoot by holding the off camera flash.