Jeffrey E.F. Friedl's Blog, page 47

An Apprentice-Geisha Photoshoot Quite Unlike Any Other

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Alluring

and a bit mysterious









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Laughing

because I said something funny
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Serious

probably because I said something nonsensical, as I'm apt to do









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Contemplative

(not really; I'd actually instructed her to look at my shoes)








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( I just can't get enough of that red umbrella )










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Drawing a Crowd Wherever She Goes

in this case it was a walk through the Gion entertainment district of Kyoto








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Quite Tall

especially with those shoes








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(though still not quite as tall as me)

photo by Zak Braverman









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Posing Here...
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Posing There...








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Posing With Tourists








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Posing With Shy Japanese Schoolkids










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Posing for Zak








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Peace

And that last picture provides the first real clue that this girl is not
the maiko
(apprentice geisha) that she otherwise appears to be, because I don't think that a real
maiko would flash the peace sign for a passer's-by photo like
this.

February 3rd is the cultural holiday setsubun,
known for bean throwing, the
warding off of evil spirits, and some Shinto
rites that involve intense bonfires.

There's also an old tradition, fallen out of popularity in recent decades and now
mostly unknown to the younger generations, of transforming your appearance
for the day into something you're not... if you do this, so the tradition
goes, you'll be free of evil spirits for the next year.

And that brings us to today's photos. Ikuko, the 20-year-old girl in
these photos, is a normal collage student who transformed into a
maiko for the Setsubun holiday.

For most girls wanting to do something like this (for the Setsubun
holiday, or just for fun), Kyoto has plenty of places where one can pay
some small fee to play dress-up as a maiko and go for an
attention-grabbing photo-op stroll. I see it all the time, and these “fake
maiko” are easy to spot (such as seen here) by their
mannerisms and the cheap quality of their clothes and accessories, in the
same way you can easily tell that the kid showing up at your doorstep on
Halloween is not really Spider Man.

Ikuko, for her transformation, did something very different.

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Not so Fake

I showed these photos to an older lady who really knew the subject, and
even when she saw the “Peace” photo she wasn't quite sure that Ikuko wasn't
a real maiko, because everything else about her seemed spot-on
correct.... because it was. The clothes and accessories are all real, as
was the preparation: she had spent three and a half hours being prepared by
a bevy of professionals that normally exclusively serve the real
maiko and geiko (Kyoto geisha) population. People to do the
hair (which, like a real maiko, is Ikuko's real hair), her makeup,
and even a specialist to help her get into the kimono. Not many women,
maiko and geiko included, can actually dress themselves in
these kimono.

Having natural grace and class, as Ikuko does, helps to complete the package.

This kind of experience is just not something one can normally have, but
Ikuko comes from an artist's family with connections in the wider cultural community
(her dad is the potter mentioned here), so I suppose that's how this unique opportunity came
about. Her family is friends with Zak's, and I met Ikuko a few years ago when she came to his house
to babysit Zak's kids.

Zak was asked to take photos for Ikuko's “transformation”, and Zak was kind enough to invite me along as well.

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Strolling in Old Kyoto








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Family Fun

with Zak, her folks, and a brother










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Typical Scene

she's in the background to the left

The narrow streets made for a picturesque setting at times, and for mild
crowded chaos at others. Japanese and foreign tourists alike would crowd in
for photos of Ikuko, and with Ikuko.

I chose to include the picture above because I like the daring bold of
the couple in the foreground, who had just had their photo taken with
Ikuko. The fuzzy guy in the near foreground is a mailman who had just
ridden his scooter through the scrum around Ikuko with a certain
indifference that I'm sure comes from the frequency with which he
encounters this kind of scene during the course of his day in Gion.

Ikuko was much more accommodating to stopping for others than a
real maiko would be, so someone familiar with Kyoto would pretty
quickly realize that she wasn't a maiko. Real maiko, when
encountered out on the street like this, can not generally be accommodating to
passers by because they are either working (and it would be rude to divert
concentration from their customer for your photo), or they're busy on their
way somewhere.

The evening after I took these photos, on the way back from dinner at Uroko with Damien, I came across two maiko, a geiko, and their customers piling into
taxis near the Shijo Ohashi bridge. A crowed had gathered, but the
maiko and geiko completely ignored everyone but their
customers to the point that a maiko was almost plowed over because
without looking she stepped right into the path of the flow of foot traffic on the sidewalk. The person who almost crashed into her happened to be the person right in front of me,
and I'm glad there wasn't an “event” because I might have then tripped over both of them,
and even if not, I didn't have my camera with me so what's the point? .

Anyway, I don't really care for the whole “geisha” thing and generally
make a specific point not to pay attention when I come across them like
this, but I really enjoyed the photoshoot with Ikuko. Perhaps it's because
it was a normal Japanese girl dipping, just for a moment, into part of her
cultural history in a culturally-authentic way.

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Also, it helps that Ikuko was accommodating for photos and was just
generally a nice person, and of course it helps a lot that, unlike the
majority of maiko and geiko that I come across, she is
actually attractive. I hope to do a “normal” photoshoot with her
when the weather warms up, perhaps at the Haradanien Garden.

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Like Culture, Like Kimono

layers deep

Making the Best of Lackluster Snow in Kyoto by Heading North

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Long Street Tall Trees

Makino, Takashima City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan

(perspective “corrected” in Lightroom to make the trees vertical, and hence the white slivers at the bottom)

The forecast for last night and today was nonstop snow for Kyoto, so it
was with disappointment but not surprise that I awoke to find just a thin
scatter of snow. Sigh, why do I get my hopes up? Even just a few inches
makes things wonderful, like this snow six years
ago, but it doesn't happen often in the city.

In the end, Kyoto saw mostly rain, and Anthony's soccer practice was
canceled, so we decided to take a drive up north for an hour or two (to
near where I took Anthony
skiing four years ago) to see whether they might have more snow.

They did, but not much.

The area we visited includes a rural street famous for being
photogenically lined with trees. I'd first heard of it years ago when a
photo by my doctor of it appeared on his computer's screensaver during an
exam and I had to stop to ask about the location, but I'd not gotten to
actually visit until today.

It was probably the worst possible time to visit.

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Bleak

The road is surprisingly long, stretching for 2½km (1½
miles) like this, lined with towering dawn
redwood. Different areas have different vibes, but today everything was
a resonating blah.

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“Full” Color View

On this street was a small temple we stopped at because we noticed a huge pile of snow had accumulated under
its steep roof, and Anthony was getting antsy to play...

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Roadside Temple With Inviting Snow

Zuikoin Temple (瑞光院)

Makino, Takashima City, Shiga Prefecture, Japan

The bottom inch or three was pure slush, but the big pile was playable snow, and play we did...

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Banzai!









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Happy To Move

Fumie sat in the warmth of the car while letting Anthony and me play, and snapped a few photos through the foggy window
with her phone...

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King of the Hill

is unseated

photo by Fumie Matsunaka Friedl








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Pause for a Photo Op

photo by Fumie Matsunaka Friedl








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The Photo I Took

(You'll notice that my photo is better than Fumie's, but that's only because I had a better camera .)

Standing on top the snow pile brought me even with the edge of the roof....

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Temple Roof Tiles








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At an Angle

At one point I wandered off to take some shots of the tree-lined street, and during that time Anthony returned to the car...

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“Mommy, I have a present for you!”

photo by Fumie Matsunaka Friedl








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Oh Well








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Tuckered Out

On the way home, in the encroaching dusk, we stopped by the southern end
of the line of trees, and I snapped this photo of the nearby mountains
enshrouded in mist and becoming enshrouded in dark...

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Dusk

Ugh! Recovering From the Accidental Deletion of an Important iPhone App

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Muddy Fun

kids' soccer at Mitsuike Sports Ground (三ツ池運動公園) in Kusatsu Japan

Well, that wasn't fun. While at Anthony's soccer game the other day, I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket to find that
a couple of apps had been “pocket deleted”, with the screen showing the dialog to confirm the deletion of a third. Apparently I put
the phone in my pocket without deactivating the screen, and it bumped around in there in the just the appropriate way to
jump through the hoops to delete an app. Twice. I should have had my pocket play the lottery that day.

I've been “pocket dialed” by friends before... the call comes in
and all I hear is background noise or them chatting with someone without
realizing that their phone has called me. This is the first time I've heard
of apps getting deleted by accident this way, and the first time I've
personally experienced my phone doing “pocket” anything, other than sitting
there.

To make things worse, the two apps that had been deleted where the two
apps I use the most (WhatsApp
Messenger and Find
my Friend), and to make it even super worster, those two apps have a
lot of local data (permissions, history, connections, etc.) that are
gone the moment you delete them, requiring a lot of hassle to set up again,
so I couldn't just re-download from the Apple App Store™ and continue on my merry way.
Arrrgh!.

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Searching for a Solution

To avoid having to set up the apps again, I had the bright idea of
restoring the phone from a recent backup once I got home. iTunes makes a
backup of the phone data when syncing, and I'd done it recently, so I
though it would be a simple matter of pressing the “restore from backup”
button in iTunes, but no, that results in a frustratingly final error
message: "iTunes could not restore the iPhone because not enough free
space is available on the iPhone." This made no sense to me because I
wasn't asking for a second copy of everything to be added to the phone, but
a simple(?) rsync-like
“make sure what's supposed to be there is actually there” synchronization. It was extra frustrating because the error message gave no hint on how to
proceed.

It turns out that the way around this is to reset the phone to its
factory settings, then restore from backup. After doing the reset,
iTunes treated it as if it was a new phone, asking “Do you want to set this
up as a new phone, or restore from the ‘Jeff's iPhone’ backup we found
lying around?”

I restored from backup, and 40 minutes of “doing stuff” in
the background later, my phone was back to its pre-“pocket delete” glory. I'll have to be more careful next time.

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The Right Stuff

pitch warriors

Environmental Portraits in the Gion Entertainment District of Kyoto

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Wardrobe Adjustment

Gion area of Kyoto, Japan








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Demur








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Hello!

I met this young lady several years ago, and was pleased to have a chance to make some photographs for her today. Her easy smile made it all too easy. I'd been borrowing Damien's Nikkor 200mm f/2 since the autumn without having encountered
a reason to use it, but today provided the perfect opportunity.

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Further Adjustments










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Drenched in Red

I've barely looked through the images so this'll have to do for now, but more photos and the story behind them are “To be continued...”

On the Approach to the Todaiji Temple in Nara

Note: this article may not appear properly in news readers.

This article contains interactive aspects that are likely removed by most news readers. Please see this particular article directly on Jeffrey's blog for full functionality.

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This is the Small One

a gate on the approach to the Todaiji Temple (東大寺の南大門),

Nara, Japan

Dipping into the largely-untapped reservoir of things I want to post
about, here are some pictures from a December 2012 visit to the Todaiji Temple (東大寺)
in Nara, about an hour's train ride south of Kyoto. I posted a bit from that trip in
“That Massive Column in Nara’s Todaiji Temple Is Nothing To Sneeze At”,
but it's a visually rich place, so I've been wanting to post much more.

I'd made the trip to take some pictures for a friend who is the
author of Lonely
Planet's “Japan” guidebook. A few of the photos from this trip made it
into the most recent edition. Another friend, Aeron, was kind enough to
make the trek with me.

The Todaiji Temple site is impressively large, dating back almost 1,300
years. On the approach we took is a massive wooden gate that seems to exist
merely to set you up for the substantially-more-impressive sights that
wait beyond.

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Todaiji in a Nutshell

deer, school kids, big wooden buildings

Looking through the gate you can see another behind, and beyond that the
temple's main building towers so high that you can't see the top of its
roof.

The gate, called the Great Southern Gate (南大門), is interesting enough
in its own right. It was originally built in 962, but the one standing
today is a reconstruction built just 815 years ago. (The sign near the top of
the photo is new, giving 「大華厳寺」, apparently an old name for the temple.)

Here's a shot exposed to reveal the detail under the roof:

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Holding Up Well

for 815-year-old construction

As with many temple gates, two guardians flank the sides of the gate.
(Wikipedia tells me they're called Kongorikishi, and
describes them as “wrath-filled muscular guardians of the Buddha”). They're almost 25½ feet tall, so they're
almost 4½ times my height. Their situation is not conducive to good photos, but here's one:

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Wrath Filled and Muscular

The other statue, at my back while taking this shot, was carved in
1203. This one dates from the same era, though I couldn't find out for sure
what year this one was carved.

Here's a wigglegram to make you feel as if you're there; wiggle your mouse over the image...

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Animatable — slowly sweep mouse from side to side to view effect
写真の上をマウスで左右にゆっくり動かすといろいろな影響を見えます。

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Moving then beyond the gate, you can see the next gate and, far beyond that, the roof of the main temple building...

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Locals

The deer in Nara can be extremely aggressive, and I can report from
personal experience that they have no qualms about coming up behind you to
bite the bag out of your hand if you just bought a snack from a vendor. Care
should be taken with fingers and small children.

Of course, tourist can't always provide breakfast, so some deer are forced to fend for themselves...

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Quick Breakfast








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Small Lake Along the Way
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Untamed

if they were tamed, they'd be giving the deer food









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In-Camera HDR

HDR was supposed to be this, but here it apparently means “Highly Distorted Reality”

Once you enter the paid area, your get your first clean view of the main
temple building, which is stupendously large for an all-wooden building
constructed hundreds of years ago....

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Lots of Tiny Doors

that are actually each colossally large








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Incense Burner

there was one at either end of the long approach walkway








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Aeron and Incense Burner








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Not Too Crowded








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Massively Overexposed By Accident

but sort of looks interesting in B&W









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False-Color Shot

playing around with this one, I colored the yellow/brown grass green








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Fire Extinguisher at the Ready








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Roof Detail








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Lots of Detail

way up there








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I See You

large incense burner just outside the entrance, opposite the one seen above

To be continued...

A Couple of Mini Bluetooth Reviews: Braven 710 Speaker and Mpow Sport Headphones

This post is a mini review of a couple of bluetooth (wireless connection) speakers I've been using recently, one small “brick” speaker for the home,
and a pair of earbuds for the gym.

Above we have the Braven
710. I lifted the (almost-certainly CGI) image from their web site; if
I would have not been lazy and instead taken a photo myself, I would have
put something there for context so that you can see that it's small... it's
about the size of a sort-of-squished hotdog bun.

We like it. It's got great sound from such a small package. I've
connected all our phones to it so that we can each use it when we like. It's splash resistant so we can bring it in the bath, and it's easy to
bring with us as we do tasks around the house.

It has a lot of extra features, like acting as a portable power brick
for small mobile devices, bridging to a non-bluetooth stereo, NFC support,
and more. For lots of details, see this
review at AppAdvice.com, which is the review that prompted me to buy
it. Or, perhaps, this overview video
from the company.

I recommend it, but I must point out that the Braven 710 suffers from the same
problem that every bluetooth audio device I've ever tried suffers from:
“stupid” where “smart user-interaction design” should be. For example,
there's no simple on/off switch that you can glance at to see whether the
thing is on... you have to press a rubbery button for several seconds and
listen for a weird deep rumbling “chirp” from the thing... the nature of
the “chirp” tells you whether you just turned it on or off. Wanted to
ensure it was on but just turned it on? Repeat.

It overloads its many functions onto just a few buttons. You can see
from the image above that there are four buttons on the side: plus, minus,
power, play. Yet by combinations of press/hold timing and magic
unicorn-horn context, functions these four buttons perform include volume
up/down, volume mute/unmute, track skip forward/backward, play/pause,
answer a phone call and hang up, pair the unit with a new device, and of
course to turn the thing on and off. It's very unsatisfying.

Still, every bluetooth audio device I've encountered suffers from the same problem, so
I don't think you'll find anything better.

Pros

Good big sound for the small, convenient package.
Splashproof, so we can bring in the bath or outside.
Easy to bring when on the go.
Can use to charge your phone in a pinch.

Cons

Stupid bluetooth-standard user interface design.

I got my Bravin 710 at
Amazon.com last month for $166 with shipping. It seems to be $150 at
the moment.

Next we have a pair of wireless ear buds, “Mpow® 2nd Gen Sport Bluetooth Stereo Headphone Wireless Headset”, that I use at the gym while working out and stretching.

Wireless buds are extremely liberating, but only if they stay in. I think I have pretty normal ears, but normal ear-buds headphones never, ever
feel comfortable nor stay in my ears. I've tried many brands, and they're
all not made for me. The worst by far are the
latest from Apple (that come with the iPhone 5s)... I
can't get them to stay in for even one second... it's as if they're
meant to be magnetic and my ears are just not metal.

So, I
was thrilled to find that this kind of clip-ish set works perfectly for me.
They sort of clip over your ears and so don't require any ear-canal
friction, so the shape of one's ear doesn't really matter.

If find them easy to put on and take off, yet when they're on they on
and in place through any activity I've tried, including high-speed pushups
and gracelessly falling off a balance ball. I can turn my head and crane my
neck to the extremes and they stay firmly in place. In this regard I'm
extremely satisfied.

Of course, they have the same “stupid UI design” caveat above that
applies to all bluetooth headsets. The buttons require some concentration
and luck to work while wearing (e.g. to temporarily mute, or to skip a
song).

Pros

STAYS PUT; doesn't fall out of my ears if I blink, or if I twist-n-shout.
Good enough sound for me (I think it's pretty good).
Good enough battery life for me (I've never exhausted the battery).
Easy on / easy off.
Good range... I can leave my phone in my bag as I move around the gym.
Small and unobtrusive. You can forget you're wearing them.
Easy to see you're wearing headphones, so people leave you alone.

Cons

Easy to see you're wearing headphones, so it creates a barrier to “community”.
May not be easy to wear with glasses that have thicker temples in the ear area.
Charging-port cover is a bit wonky, and mine broke off right away. I feel they're better for it, though a day of heavy sweat may have me regret the lack of a cover.
Stupid bluetooth-standard user interface design.

I got mine at Amazon last month for $23 (shipping included). A great value.

At the same time I'd also gotten two other headsets to test:

ECSEM® Mini Lightweight Wireless Stereo Headphones ($25),
and
Avantree AS8Q Neckband In Ear Sweat-proof Stereo Bluetooth Wireless Headphones ($38). But like any other in-ear buds they just fall out, so once I tried the Mpow ones, I ignored these. Maybe I'll give them to Anthony or something.

Sipping Sake and Seeing Silly Signs: Visiting Kyoto’s Sake-Brewing Area

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 180 —
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“All You Can Drink” Sake Flows Like Water

in my dreams

(however, water does flow like water at the Gekkeikan Sake Museum in Kyoto Japan)

I recently made my first trip to the area of southern Kyoto historically
known for its sake production, which likely dates back thousands years.
Written on the cup above is “月桂冠” (Gekkeikan), the
name of a sake-brewing company founded in 1639.

Gekkeikan sake is ubiquitous in Japan. Here you see its name on barrels outside a temple in the area...

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — 1/640 sec, f/4.5, ISO 900 —
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Entrance to the Chokenji Temple (長建寺)

“Long Health Temple” supported by sake

It's my understanding that the (certainly-empty) barrels of sake represent a monetary donation from the brewery, to match what
in olden times was an actual gift of sake. In either case, the brewery gets advertisement and good karma.

This particular temple is quite small, with a chunk of its area given to a courtyard with a couple of fenced-in features..

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Temple's Courtyard

The courtyard's main attraction is this fire pit with two big, ugly signs:

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Inexplicable

What struck me about this scene was the huge sign in the foreground,
which reads "This is not a place to throw garbage. It's a fire pit
for ceremonial burning of ceder sticks.", referring to a Buddhist
ceremony likely comparable to the Shinto ceremonies shown here and here. My first thought was
that such a sign was silly because even a child could instinctively know
that the fenced-off area surrounded by precisely-carved stone was not a
place to throw your trash. Yet, here was the big sign, so I was left
wondering what transpired to cause the owner to feel the need for such a
sign. I suppose it's a sad reflection on the state of humanity, even worse
than the
no-tripods-in-your-possession temple. Sigh.

Anyway, we continued the short distance to an old Gekkeikan factory building now used as a museum...

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Gekkeikan Okura Memorial Museum

月桂冠大倉記念館

They had water running into a basin, with a sign saying that it was from a deep well
that provides water for the sake production. I should have tried the water. Instead, I took pictures of it.

Kyoto friend Alain, who had invited me, spent considerable time composing a photo of the basin from above...

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Alain and his Basin

Showing no shame, I totally copycatted him and made my own attempt at
his shot. I've since seen his result and it's far superior to mine (because, er, he has a better camera? ), but
FWIW here's mine:

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Next to the museum were three huge barrels, the largest of which measuring about six feet across:

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Big Barrels




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Silly Sign #2

“Don't hang on or climb on”

(but, oddly, no mention about going inside)




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Hand for Scale

Long bamboo strips were woven around the barrel in what appeared to be
rings to keep the wooden slats together. I wonder whether it's cosmetic, or
whether it could actually hold the slats tightly enough to form a
watertight seal(?) It seems improbable, but perhaps they're installed while in some kind of expanded state (e.g. after boiling?) and so constrict as they dry?

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Ties that Bind

This is, of course, the answer to the other day's A Woven(ish) “What am I?”
Quiz. I'd given the hint that the location name in the image metadata
might lead one to an answer, but for the record even with that hint I myself would never have
figured it out because I'd never seen the “bamboo binding”
thing before.

Inside the small museum (which I'll cover in a separate post) you can
see a lot of history about how sake was made in former days. It was nice to
see this long-history view of Gekkeikan because in my experience it's
always been the ubiquitous cheap sake in convenience stores and
restaurants, which has given me the feeling that it's what someone stocks
when they don't want to think about quality and just need to mark “sake”
off the checklist.

Once you emerge from the display rooms, you're greeted with what was certainly my favorite sign for the day:

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Well Okay, I Don't Mind if I Do!

I love that Japanese has a word (kikizake) for “sake for tasting”.

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Pour

( staged for documentation purposes because I was too slow for the real pour )

This calls to mind
“A Bunch Of Blurry Pictures of Folks Pouring Wine” and to a lesser extent
“A Visit to Suntory’s Kyoto Beer Brewery”.

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“Retro Bottle”

100-year-old bottle design that includes its own detachable drinking cup

Sadly, the subject nor the setting weren't nearly as photogenic as at “Japan’s First Whisky: Suntory’s “Yamazaki” Distillery”.

Just like there's a huge diversity of beer taste (e.g. Guinness Stout
compared to Budweiser) and wine (thick sweet red dessert wine compared to a
dry white wine), sake tastes cover a very wide gamut, and expanding the
range farther is that the taste of many sake changes completely depending
on the temperature it's served. So, “research” along these lines could take
considerable time, and normally I would not hesitate to do this for
my blog readers, but alas, we had to move on.

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Old Factory Building




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“School-Commute Road”

(a natural translation to US English would be “School Zone”)

Wow, it's so convenient that kids can drop in for a quick drink on the way to school!

The next place we visited had some bicycles parked out front...

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... and upon entering it became clear why.... for some reason you're not allowed to ride your bicycle in!

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No Bicycles Allowed

in the Kappa Gallery

(also no dogs and no smoking, the latter of which I saw being completely ignored)

Yet another silly sign that makes me wonder what bedlam would befall the place without it.

Actually, to be precise, the sign specifically says that one may not
ride a bicycle in, which seems (to me) a bit unnatural unless they
explicitly wanted to differentiate riding from not riding. It seems to imply that it's okay so long as you push it. I couldn't test the theory,
though, because I didn't have a bicycle on me at the time.

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Actual Brewing

the heady smell was heavenly

This place had some actual brewing going on, and it smelled wonderful. Otherwise, there wasn't much to recommend a visit.

Two more signs from the walk home...

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“For Advertising Leaflets”

sign on a bag hanging on the door of an old house

Certain local businesses in Japan advertise incessantly via leaflets
shoved in mailboxes (we get several per day), and I can imagine that this
homeowner got sick of people ignoring a “no leaflets” sign and littering
their doorstep, so perhaps this is a compromise that reduces flying
trash.

And finally in a covered mall, notice the biggest sign hanging above the teeming crowd...

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 cropped — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 2500 —
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Waste of Time

If you need to be “reminded”, reminding won't help. The “heart” with the happy smoker reminds us to follow smoking
regulations. The non-heart items remind us to not litter, to not walk through the crowd with a lit cigarette, to not ride a bicycle
through the crowd, and to not leave your bicycle parked in the way.

And indeed it seems that reminding does not help because none of these seem to be followed.

A Woven(ish) “What am I?” Quiz

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/640 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1600 —
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What am I?

I came across this today and knew it'd be a great “What am I?” quiz. If you want to cheat, the image metadata includes a hit. Maybe.

As always, I'll keep any guesses private until I reveal the answer in a day or two.

Continuing with the Seifuso Villa: Between the Tea House and the Garden

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — 1/50 sec, f/6.3, ISO 125 —
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Behind the Seifuso Villa

清風荘 · Kyoto, Japan
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Dipping my pen again into the very deep well that was November's visit to the Seifuso Villa (清風荘) in Kyoto, today's post has a bit more from
early on in the visit first seen in
“Entrance Foyer to the Seifuso Villa in Kyoto”.

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Formal Gate

this gate, seen from afar
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I vacillate on whether the photo above is of interest. I've deleted it (and then undeleted it) several times.

I showed the garden's formal tea house in “Approaching the Tea House at
Kyoto’s Seifuso Villa”. Near it are a few small buildings loosely connected with shared outside passageways....
one building being a prep room for the staff, another a waiting room for guests, and finally a lesser-class tea room...

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Support Buildings




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Entrance to the Waiting Room





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Simplicity Incarnate

the waiting room






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Artsy Bamboo

on the path to the tea house
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Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — 1/100 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100 —
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Wash Basin

near the tea house

Next to the waiting room was a tea house of lesser status. The next two
photos of our host, Will Baber (a professor at Kyoto University's business
school), makes for an interesting comparison of widely-differing perspective
effects possible with a wide-angle lens. In the first photo he looks tiny,
and in the second positively ginormous. He's in the same room in both shots...

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Tiny Will




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Ginormous Will

The square on the floor in front of Will's feet above make it clear that
this is a tea room. That bit of tatami mat can be removed, revealing place
were a pot of tea can be heated over charcoal (the kind of charcoal,
actually, being put to alternative uses as seen here).

Also, compare the ceiling here with that of the waiting room above...
the ceiling on the right side of this room (the side for the guest) is of a
much higher status than the waiting-room ceiling, which itself is of a
higher status than the host-side (left side) of this room . I wish I'd
taken a photo of the ceiling in the staff/prep room... I'm sure it would
have been of an appropriately-lower class still.

Here's another shot of the same room from the same location with the same lens, but with a composition
that looks completely normal this time (no mini/huge effects... just Damien peeking in)...

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Kitchenette Shelves

in the staff's prep building





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Path to the Garden





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Showing us the Main Garden




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Heading In




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Will Baber and our Guide

our gracious host and our guide

(the guide, walking away in the background, has been amateurishly cloned out)

The photo above originally had someone walking away in the background,
and I was going to post it here like that, but on a lark I tried painting
out the whole guy roughly with Lightroom 5's new Spot Healing Brush. I had absolutely no expectation that the result would be anything but laughable,
but to my surprise it was actually pretty good for the 10 seconds of work
that I put into it... good enough to spend a bit more time tweaking it. It
won't pass even the most basic inspection, but at first glance it's good
enough.

To be continued...

A Few Close-Ups of a Wasp’s Nest

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/250 sec, f/8, ISO 400 —
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Wasp Nursery

As about half guessed correctly, last week's
A Textured, Layered “What am I?” Quiz is a “paper” wall from a wasp's nest.

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Knocking it Down

my brother Alan knocking down the dormant volleyball-sized nest

This was prior to the “arctic vortex” descending on Ohio, so it was
prior to the pretty frost
patterns, but it was still plenty chilly.

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Ready for a Picture

this is the piece seen in the quiz photo




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Lots of Nice Detail

click through to the larger version to see the various fibers




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Detail: Sun-n-Shadow Edition

difficult to snap while the thing was blowing in the wind

The “paper” is from the wall surrounding the whole thing. Inside were the combs...

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 No   Vacancy




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Multi-Layered





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Not too exciting, photography wise, but for me at least a little interesting.