To start things off, here is a nice exterior shot of my new apartment building. It won't win any architectural awards, but I suppose there is something to be said for the functional modern box look.
I was glad last week that the aftershocks finally stopped waking me up. Seriously we had a pretty good number of aftershocks hitting the area at seven or eight in the morning. For a guy who works from one to ten this is incredibly annoying.
But this is Japan, so of course we had something new to wake me up hours before my alarm.
Mayoral elections! Hooray! Yup, Kanazawa got a new Mayor over the weekend, and in the days leading up to the elections the city was besieged by candidates speaker trucks. The super right wing fascist speaker trucks are pretty annoying, but relatively limited in number. But when you have a whole stack of candidates on the stump in a city the size of Kanazawa it can get pretty bad. Songs, announcements, bored looking pretty women waving a pedestrians. It seems a strange way to try and get people to vote for you. Hey, lets be really annoying and piss off the electorate! To be fair, I guess TV attack adds in the states are pretty bad too.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think this is the list of candidates. Oh, and with the election safely out of the way, I figured on a nice long sleep in this morning. Well, that was before the LP Man spent 30 minuted manhandling large, empty, loud LP bottles into his truck. It sounded like some crazy steel drum/ gong instrument. Argh!
The Cherry Blossoms are out this week, and it is much better than last year. Spring 2006 was really cold and rainy, and the flowers were late and strangely spread out. While Denver has been braving snow, Kanazawa's early April has been pretty nice during the day, though nights have been pretty frigid.
Ironically enough I hadn't intended to make any HDR images of the Sakura. After all, there isn't a High Dynamic Range to capture. Lucky me, I accidentally clicked on the wrong file name, and created the picture below.
For an 'accident' I really loved the strange 'glow' effect on the flowers, so I quickly fiddled with a few other pictures. While the original is still the best of the bunch, I think some of these look really great.
The effect is certainly very different, and while it won't supplant more traditional looking pictures anytime soon, I enjoy both creating and viewing HDR images. That said, I have to admit that while these look interesting and cool, the original images do look better, and will be posted soon.
1 comment:
The glow effect is pretty neat. I like it, though you're right in that the first is the best of the bunch. I think it's the circular shape.
Apparently if you wave to the women in the trucks they get really excited. I guess they're just hated by everyone.
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