Author: travel67

100 Yen CDs

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Japanese video stores such as Tsutaya and GEO rent DVDs, Blu-ray discs, comics, video games and CDs. Sometimes they sell off the older DVD’s and CD’s as ex-rentals and recently GEO had a big sale with whole shelves of CD’s on sale for just 100 yen each. It’s been fantastic wandering around the aisles of various stores and as an entire album is less than a single song on iTunes I’ve been quite happy to try things I wouldn’t have otherwise bought. Surprisingly a large number of the CDs were by Scatman John, which even at 100 yen, I managed to resist. So if you happen to see me in my car singing hits from the nineties you now know why. “Movin’ to the country, Gonna eat a lot of peaches. Movin’ to the country, Gonna eat me a lot of peaches”

Million Dollar Music Videos

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I came across a list of the most expensive music videos ever made on Wikipedia. 31 videos on the list cost at least a million dollars to make.  I was surprised  that along with global superstars including Michael Jackson, Madonna and Britney, four of the million dollar videos were made for Japanese singer pop star Ayumi Hamasaki. Here’s one of Ayumi’s videos, Fairyland. I expect that taking Ayumi, dancers and film crew to a tropical island probably took up a good part of the budget. The video also serves as a useful public information announcement on the dangers of candles.

The never ending cold and Photoshop.

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I have had a cold for nearly 6 weeks. The sore throat and runny nose ended after a few days but I have a lingering cough that doesn’t want to disappear. So I tried to rest, eat healthy food and give my body time to recover. When that had no effect I went to the doctor and was given some antibiotics and various other tablets. When they had no effect the doctor gave me some different antibiotics and another selection of tablets. I think I just need a good dose of sunshine, as the weather has been miserable for weeks. Meanwhile, I’ve been sitting at my computer and learning about Photoshop. You can do a lot of amazing things in Photoshop and it is surprisingly easy to manipulate reality. As a photographer this raises all sorts of ethical questions about what you should or shouldn’t do to an image. For news photographers the rules are clear, nothing should be changed. For travel photography I think it would be best to do the same. However, it …

Flip Canvas Horizontal

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Flip Canvas Horizontal is a useful adjustment in Photoshop that gives you a mirror image of your photograph. A few words of warning, which photographers and particularly photo editors should remember. Flipping an photograph that contains writing will create problems. This is obvious if you can read the text, less so if you can’t.  If a photo editor or graphic designer can’t read kanji it becomes far too easy for images to get flipped during layout. This has happened to me several times. Even more troubling are the cases where an image of a Japanese person in a kimono is flipped. In one simple step in Photoshop you have created the living dead. This is because “For both men and women, always wrap the right side of the kimono over the body, then overlap it with the left side. Right on top of the left is only used to dress a corpse for burial.” Japanese kimono.com Soon you will begin to notice the flip canvas horizontal adjustment in unexpected places. This screen shot from the movie …

Ugly Overhead Wires – Shifting Baselines

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In response to a few comments to the previous post… Do people get used to having electrical wires stretching through the sky, I’m sure. Does this lessen the frustration you might otherwise have, probably. Does it mean that it is no longer a problem, not at all. The phenomenon of shifting baselines as applied in fisheries and ecology is that the perception of what a “healthy” ecosystem is worsens as we get used to successive levels of damage. In Okinawa this idea could be applied to the coral reefs, the forests, beaches or the presence of wiring and concrete poles. Here’s a short public service announcement that explains a little more:

Ugly Overhead Wires

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Last weekend was cloudy and rainy. Rather than taking photos of cherry blossom I was stuck inside sitting at the computer. Then, following a gust of wind, my internet connection went dead. I phoned NTT (on my mobile) and after confirming that one of the green lights on the modem was no longer lit, then sent around an engineer. Turns out that the telephone line had been bent out of shape by the branches of a swaying tree. I didn’t ask, but I wonder how many people lose their phone, internet or electricity when typhoons bring much stronger winds. Isn’t it time that Okinawa thought about burying some of these cables? This isn’t a new idea, a few years ago I had a monthly column in the Asahi Weekly newspaper. Here’s the column from March 2004. Power to the People I can see the ocean from my living room window. This may sound idyllic, but running directly in front of my house is a mass of wires. Concrete pillars support various sets of electrical and …

Island Icons – Dolphin Trainers

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Dolphin Delight Ryo Nakasone and Azusa Watanabe are dolphin trainers at Okinawa’s Expo Park. Ryo Nakasone grew up in Motobu not far from the aquarium where he now works. While at high school in Naha he was a champion boxer and was scouted by Nihon University where he fought in the light-fly weight class while a student. After graduation, he returned to his hometown and began working at Expo Park. Now 29, he has been a dolphin trainer for five years. Azusa Watanabe majored in fisheries studies at Nagasaki University. She moved to Okinawa four months ago, and at age 23, is the aquarium’s newest dolphin trainer. What types of dolphin live at Expo Park? “There are 82 species of dolphin in the world, and we have five species living here at Expo. They are the Pacific white-sided dolphin, Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin, rough-toothed Dolphin, bottlenose dolphin and false killer whale.” I heard a rumor that killer whales are actually a type of dolphin? “It is true; they are part of the same biological family Delphinidae. …

Nagoya

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I’ve been busy the last few days writing a Best of Nagoya article.  I spent two weeks  in and around the city in March 2008 collecting information and taking photographs, but it is only now that I am finally getting around to converting my scrawled notes into what will hopefully become coherent sentences. Unfortunately a few things have happened in Nagoya over the last couple of years that have rendered images and possible recommendations a little redundant. The Villagio Italia an Italian themed mini mall was so kitsch  it was wonderful. It had its own Venetian canal, boutiques selling Carnevale masks, and a supermarket stocked with Italian wines, cheeses and pasta. You could even have a gelata while sitting beneath Michelangelo’s David. Unfortunately less than 2 months after my visit it closed. Then a month later, Kyu the star attraction of the Port of Nagoya Public Aquarium died. And today, just a moment after writing about “the local textile firm that became the world’s largest automaker,” I hear that Toyota is suffering from its biggest crisis in …

On the Bookshelf – Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer / A Propos de Paris

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Last Christmas both my parents and my brother gave me books on photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It turns out that by blogging about what is on my bookshelf, they were able to deduce what wasn’t there. Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is a comprehensive collection of Cartier-Bresson’s work spanning the years 1926 to 1979 and includes images from France, Mexico, China, Russia, and even Japan. In Henri Cartier-Bresson: À Propos de Paris he delves deeper into his relationship with Paris. One aspect of his images I find fascinating is his ability to get fly-on-the-wall shots where the presence of the photographer is unnoticed or ignored. I have never used Leica cameras, but their compact size would not only make the photographer more maneuverable, I presume, it also reduces the impact the photographer has on the scene. Subjects would have behaved differently for example if he’d used a giant camera like my Pentax 67 that tends to get stared at rather than ignored (Not to mention the rifle-like crack of the Pentax’s shutter). My favorite Cartier-Bresson image can be …