Shimonoseki

This is one of my best night shots from the Kyushu trip a month ago. The Shimonoseki bridge connects the main island of Japan to the southern island of Kyushu. For cars at least — I think the train we were on went through a tunnel.

This shot, however, demonstrates again one of my favorite ghetto night-shooting techniques — balance the camera on something flat, crank the shutter speed up, set a timer, gingerly push the shutter button and back off. It turned out rather well except for some chromatic aberration I had to fix. The lens wasn’t even wide open…

Kaori

Continuing a spate of portraiture that I’ve been posting recently, I’d like to show off a portrait of my girlfriend’s friend, Kaori. This may come as a shock, but I did NOT travel around Kyushu alone. Actually, there were four of us; me, Sakiko, Kaori and another guy, Stu, that pretty much ruined any picture taken of him by being utterly hilarious. It’s possible I’ll post one just for laughs later on. Anyway, often we were sitting on trains, and shooting portraits just kind of came naturally (as well as jabbing my lens at the windows and shooting everything that went by). This photo also features a new “brush” I found in Lightroom — the “skin softening” brush, which makes me feel like I cheated on this photo, but I like the overall effect.

White

This photo is rather peculiar. Early one morning in Aso, my girlfriend decided to take a picture of a puzzle she did the previous night at our guest house. She’s another enthusiastic amateur, and of course she corrected the white balance for the indoor lighting. When we got to our lookout point on the edge of the beautiful, foggy caldera encircling the peaks of Aso, I started shooting excitedly, all the while wondering why all my pictures were coming out blue. It took me over half an hour to figure it out and correct the white balance, but in trying to recolor some of the shots I ended up with this interesting, polariod-ish, washed-out color. Because I actually kind of like all of the Holga and polaroid photography I’m seeing across the internet these days (this guy does a lot), I kind of like the effect. Bonus photo from the same spot (natural color) after the jump.

Tearful

 

Oddly enough, this is a picture of a cat. Just a stray we found walking around Glover Garden, in Nagasaki. It looks really sad to me.

One thing that amazes me about Japan is their utter defiance of any erosion of history (that isn’t of their own design). At Yoshinogari Koen, they rebuilt millennia old houses based on suggestions of structures they uncovered. Much of Nagasaki was consumed in the conflagration following the atomic bomb, but they rebuilt the historic dutch homes exactly like they once were (and, apparently, replanted this garden). 

Steamed Eggs

 

 

A good old fashioned volcanic-steam egg-b-que.

Apologies to those who might have seen this image before — it’s one I rather like.

In the volcanically active Kyushu region, especially in the little hot spring town of Beppu, there’s sometimes so much geothermic steam that vents have to be installed in backyards and parks. They’ve managed to turn the hotter hot springs (the ones that gush, boiling, from the ground) into a series of clever tourist traps called the jigoku, or “burning hells”. Some are quite colorful and beautiful, with gentle blue or white water, and some are just steam erupting from piles of rock, which they built a truly sad little zoo around.

Boiled eggs are common in Japan, but they take it a step further and use the boiling, mineral-rich hot spring water or steam to prepare the “onsen tamago”. They’re pretty tasty, but seeing them cooking is….a little unusual.

Cloudy Sunset

 

My beautiful Kyushu sunset

Captured on the train from Aso to Beppu in Kyushu.