Kintai-kyo of Japan

The Kintai Bridge of Iwakuni Japan. The ancients built this thing in 1673 so that I could photographic it some 300 years later. Pretty awesome of them to do that for me. It's also that style of Japanese Architecture where no nails were used. Just interlocking wood pieces. I made sure to do the ol push on it with my foot to test it's strength before walking across it. But only after paying the $3 toll.

I stayed at the hotel just across the street in Iwakuni Japan. It's not every day they light it blue like this so it was a rare occasion to get to see it and photograph it like this. I forget why it was lit blue. Some celebration or something. 

I love this old Japanese architecture style, and the history of the Kintai Bridge is pretty cool. You should check it out on Wikipedia if you want to know more.

The Bali Monkey

This photo was taken of some random monkey I found near a temple. These guys were a bit more intimidating than the monkeys in Monkey Forest. As we were walking to see the Katchak Dance I saw this guy on the wall along with a few others. I quickly switched to my 70-200mm lens and snapped a few shots of him. Like many of the locals of Bali, these guys are also known to steal your stuff. Anything shiny. So I made sure I put my camera on a strap slung around my shoulder and my glasses inside my camera bag.

Shanghai Lights

The city of Shanghai China is a pretty awesome place. I wasn't expecting it to be as cool as it was. The whole time I was there I couldn't stop thinking about how it reminded me of Blade Runner. It was pouring rain the whole time causing the wet streets to reflect all the neon Congee signs. Which was sort of the look of the Blade Runner cities.

This was also my first time doing photography in the pouring rain. I got soaked, my camera got soaked. I tried to keep my umbrella above my gear but when shooting with a really wide lens, it kept getting in the shot. At the end of the day only one buttons wasn't working on the camera, which was fine the next day when everything dried out. Seems like my trusty ol Canon 5Dmkii can handle anything. 

The Rolling Rice Fields of Bali

This is taken on the 800 meter hike to the Sari Organik Cafe in the middle of the Rice Fields of Bali. It was quite a hike that I did in sandals, injuring my foot in the process. But, well worth it. I got some many great shots from this hike it was one of those lucky times of day where the clouds were doing something interesting. 

I'm not really sure if it's good or bad, but I do a lot of handheld HDR photography. This was one of them. The only disadvantage I can directly see from doing this is you can't shoot at the really high apertures or even long exposures. Some people say it makes the images softer when Photomatix re-aligns them but I haven't really been able to tell. It seems Photomatix makes my images a bit soft no mater what I do. Not a huge deal since I can just bring back the sharpness later. Still trying to figure out to make razor sharp hdr photos without extra post sharpening work.

Call of the Wild from Bali Indonesia

This last week I've been in Bali and China. Haven't been able to do any post since I haven't had internet that was fast enough to load my webpage in under 5 minutes. But now I'm back proper civilization, Japan.

This little guy is from the Monkey Forest in Bali Indonesia. It's a pretty awesome place. These monkeys seem a little friendlier than the monkeys in another part of the island I encountered. It might be because these are sort of contained in a Monkey preserve where the other ones are more wild.

In general Bali is such a great place for photography, There is so much to do there I actually managed to sprain my foot from too much walking through crazy jungle forests without proper arch supports in my sandals. There were a few days were we literally walked all day only stopping to eat lunch. This was one of those days. I'm a desk job guy, not cut out for all this walking stuff.

Itsukushima Shrine of Miyajima

So today I'm in Bali Indonesia and finally have an internet connection and some down time. So, I decided to continue working on my photos from Japan while kindly feeding the local mosquito population. I'm in one of those open living room hotels so there is all sorts of wildlife around me. Mainly mosquitos and geckos. With a couple frogs. Oh, and some strange dude just walked in saying the front door was cracked open. Which it probably was, making me wonder if he was just being a nice dude that I think maybe worked here and was just doing a friendly little security check, or if he was being Mr. Sneaky Pants and going around checking for unlocked doors so he could steal stuff. I guess I'll never know. I wonder if my laptop will fit in the safe.

I have taken some awesome photos of Bali today and yesterday but haven't had time to process and sort them all yet. That might be tomorrows post, if the internet still works. ;)

Today's Photo

So this is the Itsukushima Shrine of Miyajima Japan. It's off the coast of Hiroshima. They built this shrine something like 400 years ago and the reason they built it in the water is because they believed the island itself was a god.

I got lots of great photos of this thing but will start off with this one. I've started applying some textures to my photos as an experiment and wanted to write a little about it. I feel with a shot like this that is otherwise uninteresting, it really helps add character and mood. I'm still experimenting with this technique and want to eventually share what I've learned. I know some photographers like to just throw the texture on there switch it to overlay and call it a day, but I really think to do it right, it takes a bit more work than that. Multiple layers, multiple duplicated textures, multiple blending modes etc.

When I get back to the US of A I plan on doing some really nice free tutorials on this and some other tricks I've figured out. If you've noticed my blogs history I've only really been doing landscape photography for about three months now and have progressed with it pretty quickly. I've noticed a lot of the good landscape photographers don't freely sharing their secrets, most make you pay for absolutely every bit of knowledge with flatbooks or tutorials. Some even make you pay for knowledge on mistakes you might be making that you don't even know about :) So I'm going to be that guy.

View of Hiroshima CIty

This is a view of Hiroshima City from the top of the Mitsui Garden Hotel I was staying at. This is my second time to Hiroshima now and I really like it. It seems a bit more mellow than some of the other bigger cities and there is a lot to do all around this area. Plus the food here is amazing. They're known for it's Oysters and Okonomiyaki which are like this pancake type dish with noodles. They have more than 2,000 restaurants that serve this in this city. 

This photo is an HDR photo taken through the glass window of the restaurant at the Hotel. It's on something like the 25th floor. Nothing to fancy about this photo. Just used one of my Photomatix Presets and some color and Lightroom 4 with final touch ups and sharpening in Photoshop. 

Looking Down the Takachiho Gorge

This shot is from higher up the path that goes along the side of the Takachiho Gorge in Japan. When I was taking this photo there was actually this old Japanese dude shooting the Manai Falls with a film camera with some nice Pentax lenses. It's nice seeing old school photographers like that still shooting film. It kind of makes me want to get out my old film camera and play around with it for a couple days to see what I can come up with. I own a a Canon so I think it will still accept all my EOS mount lenses. 

I'm actually still waiting for Canon to release a D800 competitor. I know you can't really compare the 5Dmkii or mkiii to the Nikon D800 since they are purposed completely different, but for this style of photography I'd like to have more megapixels. And mainly because it would be nice to crop in more on some shots and still be able to produce decent prints.

Kawabata Street in Fukuoka Japan

This photo was taken down at Kawabata Street in the downtown city part of Fukuoka Japan. It's near Canal City and the Kushida Shrine where they were having the Shichi-Go-San ceremony. This is a celebration of the growth and well-being of young children. So what happens is parents will dress their three, five and seven year old kids up in little traditional Japanese outfits and take their pictures near the shrines. It was cool. 

The Kawabata Street itself is a strip of all different kinds of shops under this dome roof. If you're into checking out some Japanese stores and culture this is the place to go.

Taking a photo of this place was pretty straight forward. After looking at photography so much you start to realize right away that there is often really only a couple good ways to take a photo of a location. With this one it just meant standing in the middle with my wide angle lens pointing up and shooting. I shot this HDR handheld then combined the photos in Photomatix to align the separate shots and create a tonemapping between the different exposures. And then I did all the rest in Lightroom and Photoshop. 

Autumn in Japan

It's Autumn in Japan and that means some awesome landscapes. This is from Southern Japan on the Gokase-Gawa River just coming out of the Takachiho Gorge.  It's not a super easy place to get to. I was probably the only white dude there the whole day. Which is probably why you see the two girls on the boat taking a picture of me. Well either that or the Takachiho Gorge right behind me. Probably me though.  :)

I haven't been shooting too many HDR photos lately. I'm kind of finding in many situations it's just not necessary. Even when I shoot three shots bracketed I'll still often end up just picking one of the raws and pulling up the exposure I need. The Canon 5dmkii does such a good job at shooting a very high dynamic range. I think it has a range somewhere around seven usable stops, which is quite a bit. For instance, in this photo the sky was just sort of overcast anyway and shooting HDR wouldn't have helped this situation since it was just a giant white softbox. So I just let it glow and let the light rays come in as it look naturally. Then there was nothing I needed in the shadows so I just let them be dark. Then a thousand tweaks and filters and effects later, I came out with this photo. A beautiful photo capturing the Autumn in Japan at the Gokase-Gawa River. It's actually sort of the reverse angle looking out of the Takachiho Gorge where on a very rare and special day, if you're lucky, you'll see a 6'3" red headed white dude rowing a boat. Just like what the two Japanese girls taking the photos saw from their row boat in this photo. What an epic day! 

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