Photo School Results

I've spent the last month taking an online photography class at The Perfect Picture School of Photography. It was a pretty solid course, and helped me spot some of the weak points in my photography. We shall see if it leads to an improvement or not! Here is the coursework I submitted over the last month, some of which I have posted here before and some of which is new.


Eyrie Pagoda


Eikando Bridge


Marie

The first lesson was to fill the frame with your subject. While I had some good closeups of leaves and the like, I decided to go with a portrait, as it's traditionally a weak point of mine, and some landscapes as those are some of my favorite subjects. Of the three, Marie got a Perfect Picture statement from one of the teachers, which made me pretty pleased.


The Lone Pilgram


Fall at Kanazawa Castle

The next lesson was the Rule of Thirds. Looking back through my work I noticed a great many photographs that completely ignore the Rule of Thirds. Oops. As for the two submissions, the top one got good marks, but the bottom one should be thirds the other way, here the sky here is boring and the castle much more interesting.


Fushimi Inari


Info Desk


Christmas at Labbro

This lesson was framing, using something in the photographt to 'trap' the viewers eye. This was a tricky lesson, I had some ideas of good frames, but this was the week we had two hours of sunshine in about 8 days. I had to get pretty creative and seek frames inside, with one legacy shot from May in Kyoto. Gotta love that Fushimi Inari. All three were well liked, though of course none are perfect.


Past and Future


Nishi Chaya


Geisha Crane

The final assignment was to work a subject. We had to take one area/ subject and rather than settle for one nice picture of it, keep going. We had to try using new lenses and new perspectives to 'see' our subject in as many different ways as possible. A rare moment of sunshine had me out the door and down the block to the local Geisha district, and I rather like how they came out. The Crane detail was praised, as well as the long shot, but the picture with the looming apartment building was too busy, subtracting from the impact of the beautiful geisha houses.

Photo School

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the people who I have held up as I fiddle with my camera to take a picture. However, this post is to show you why I do that. While I was in Koya-san with Zach a month ago I took several "double shots" to compare the automatic setting, and manual setting. Auto gives you speed. Point and shoot. Manual takes longer, settings to choose, light to measure, but usually gives you much better pictures.

For example, the morning shot above is a very tricky one, with the sharp shadow line. Auto sets the exposure for the shadow, so while you can see detail quite well, it blows out the rest of the photo, and imparts a strange, ghostly bluishness.





I bought a couple of photo books by Bryan Peterson a few months back, one of them devoted to digital photography. One setting you have with a digital camera but not film is white balance. By changing what the camera thinks of as "white" you can skew the color of the whole photo, in subtle ways. In Manual mode you can set your white balance yourself, and if you choose the "cloudy" setting, even in full sun, you get a nice "orange" shift. The shot becomes much warmer, and looks a lot more friendly and interesting than the harsh and blue tinted automatic version.





This was another tricky one. I wanted a shot of the detail in the ashes on this incense burner. On automatic the exposure is set to the background, and the detail is lost in overexposure. So when I reshot, I cranked down my shutterspeed a bit and voila! The ashes come through perfectly. While this does leave the background a bit underexposed, it *is* the background afterall, and not the focus of the shot.

A final bevy of temples.

While the cemetery complex is probably the star attraction at Koya-san there are certainly plenty of other temples and assorted religious sites. Danjogaran Temple is the head temple of the area, but that is not the reason Zach and I paid the admission fee.



Inside there was a room where some not terribly famous noble commited seppuku. This was enough to get the blood-thirsty American tourists to drop in for a visit. While we never pinpointed the exact room, I guess it had been cleaned in the intervening centuries, the temple was very beautiful and well worth the tour. And hey, included in the admission was a cookie and some tea.







This giant Pagoda stood out, but it too (alas) had an admission fee and we decided that paying 200 yen to look at MORE Buddist art was just not a compelling idea. I think with pagodas, unless you can go to the top, the outside is far more interesting than the inside.



We also swung by the Tokugawa family mausoleum but it was much less interesting than we expected. I mean for the family grave of the people who ruled Japan for two hundred years, you'd expect a bit ... More. I mean yeah I know they have the entire Nikko compex, but only Ieyasu and his grandson are buried there.

After getting up so early and walking around all morning on a breakfast of miso, rice , and pickled veggies we were ready for something with oomph.



So we hit up the Osaka branch of Outback Steakhouse for my second steak in a year. Yes, it was heavenly. I think I need to visit Osaka more often!

500,000 graves

After breakfast we walked across town to Okuno-in, a temple/ graveyard complex that is said to be the final resting place of 500,000 people. It is the largest graveyard in Japan, and our hosts said it was the largest in the world. I wonder about that claim, it does double the 260,000 buried at Arlington National Cemetary. But "biggest in the world" is a big claim to live (die?) up to. Certainly it depends on how you define cemetary, the Parisian Catacombs hold the remains of 5-6 million people.



The reason so many want to be buried here lies with Kukai, the still meditating founder of the Koya-san temple complex. At the end of the world, he will be going straight to Buddist heaven. If you happen to be nearby, you can catch a ride with him and be guaranteed a slot.



Meandering around a giant mountain cemetary at 9 in the morning is awsome. We beat most of the large tourist groups, and had the place just about to ourselves for quite a while.



It felt very different from your average final resting place, peaceful yes, but more wild and less well tended than any Denver cemetary. Many of the older monuments were overgrown and covered in moss and lichen. The occasional spiderweb also intruded on the proceedings.





Here we have Zach, on the pathway leading up towards the end of the graveyard at Okuno-in temple. The whole area was just so serene and beautiful, a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Osaka or Tokyo or even Kanazawa!



Another popular area is this mountain of Jizo statues. Jizo is the Buddist patron of children that die very young like miscarriages, stillborn and abortions. Mothers wrap a red bib around the statues or pour water on them to save their children from hell.



Over closer to Okuno-in itself, which I have no photos of because it was a photo free zone and my camera is not a subtle one, there was this area where people could splash water on various statues. I don't know the exact why of the ritual, but I gave it a shot anyway! Too bad the photo didn't quite come out, but I may post it later anyway.





Closer to the main entrance was a block of much newer graves, and among them were a phenomenon that I imagine is unknown outside Japan. Corporate graves. Yup, you too can be eternally entombed with all the backstabbing, gossiping coworkers you hated all your life! No thanks, I can't think of any company I'd want to spend all eternity with. That said the rocket memorial is pretty cool looking.



We walked on out of the main entrance, got a little turned around, and then headed out to continue our sightseeing with viewing a few more... Temples!! But the next temple on the itinerary contains a little secret...

Note: I apologize for dragging my two day Koya-san trip out so much. I just took so many photos that I like I keep having to break it up into smaller chunks to keep from overwhelming my legion of fans *cough*. It was gonna be a two parter, not a four parter! (with an interesting and only slightly related 5th! post already scheduled.)

Early to bed and early to rise...

I have always enjoyed sleeping on tatami. While it is sleeping on the floor, it seems much more comfortable than even thick carpet would be. At our temple we had some wonderfully thick and warm futons, so I slept like a baby. Mostly. While I may love tatami and futons, I declair that the Japanese 'bean pillow' is the most uncomfortable pillow ever devised.



So when I woke up over an hour early, around 4:40ish or so, that blasted billow kept me from any more delicious sleep. I decided that I may as well explore the area a bit more and *do something* rather than lie in bed hating my pillow for an hour. I grabbed my camera and headed out into the morning chill. It was a very pleasent time to be wandering about a town of temples. There was nobody on the streets yet, certainly no tourists. As it was around 2:30 in the afternoon back home, I decided to give Denver a mid-afternoon wakeup call. Luckily Dad was home, and we had a nice chat, though I think my shivering made me hard to understand sometimes!







Then it was time for the morning service, which was much more interesting and slightly less painful than the previous nights meditation. The atmosphere of the service was fascinating, so like and yet sooooo far from the church services *I'm* used to. I'm very glad to have had the opportuninty.

From there it was breakfast time. A fairly typical Japanese breakfast really, rice, miso, pickles, some unidentified plants, and the best tasting pears I have ever had. While it wasn't bacon and eggs, it was pretty good. Not quite filling enough though, it lacked the 'stick to your ribs' of a big plate of buttermilk pancakes. (drool)

The view from our room

With that out of the way, checkout time was 9:00, and we didn't stick around much past 8. We had a whole town to explore, along with what they said was the largest cemetary in the world (500,000). So we struck off through the still pretty deserted town...





Next: Now *that* is a cool headstone

My god it's full of temples...

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
10,9,8,7,5,4,3,2,1

The sound of me messing up an attempt at esoteric meditation. How did it come to this?

The cable car

It all started when Zach left half of his huge luggage at my house. He admits that carrying both suitcases to my place from Nagano was one of the stupidest things he ever did, and wasnt about to tackle it while trying to find a new apartment in Osaka. So he asked me if after a few weeks I could bring the second Bag of Doom down to his pad in Kansai. Like a fool I said yes, but to make the trip a bit more worth while Zach suggested we then decamp to Koya-san in Wakayama Prefecture.

Our Temple

In a high mountain valley, reachable by a very vertigiganous cable car ride, lies the Buddist retreat of Koya-san (Mt Koya). Founded in 819 by one very famous monk named Kukai, Koya-san in the center of Esoteric Shingon Sect Buddism. Of course what is really important is that out of 110 (or so) temples that lie scattered about the area, around 50 of them allow visitors to stay overnight.



When you spend a year in Japan you do get the chance to see a LOT of temples. Big temples, small temples, new temples, old temples. Enough that they really start to blend together in your memory. However to go from just a tourists glance to actually staying overnight, now that is a rare cultural opportunity. A chance to experience something really new and fascinating, and eat delicious temple food!



Our temple was over 200 years old, and the art was amazing. Our room had gold leaf covered shoji screens, I wonder if it was Kanazawa gold leaf?, a beautiful view of the garden, and an area larger than both of our apartments combined. Despite the 12 months of residence, I rarely get the chance to sleep on tatami, which is a shame as it really is quite comfortable. Its too bad you can't say that about the rice (beans?) filled torture implements that pass for pillows around here. My ear always feels like Ive been fight Mike Tyson when I wake up!



With some time to kill before evening meditation and supper, Zach and I set out for a quick tour of town. We encountered this amazing Demon lamp right down the street from our accomodations.



A litte further into town we saw this incredible statue. It is one of the most creepily realistic statues I have ever seen.



One of the buildings had a pitch black basement that I assume is a Buddist hell. In it were a few displays, including this awsome neon looking one. I have absolutly no idea what significance it has! Looks cool though. ;-)



Of course even in a Buddist mecca like Koya-san, there is a Shinto Shrine tucked away, just so nobody forgets that there are TWO major religions around here. This was a beautiful, if rather dilapidated, Inari shrine, which if anybody has been keeping track is still my favorite Shinto deity. Any god that uses foxes as his representitives is OK in my book.

After we got back we settled down in the main chamber along with 5 Spanish travelers and tried our hands at esoteric meditation. The head priest told us to count forward one to ten and then do it backwards. I talked to Zach later and he said we should have done that once, and then emptied our minds. Heh. I thought we had to do it over, and over, and over again. So for around thirty minutes I sat there in a very painful lotus position counting 1-10 10-1. Wow was that an interesting experience, but not one I think I will ever do again. Meditation doesn't seem to be for me.

After our experiment in pain thresholds and sleeping legs, it was time for a fully vegan dinner. No fish, animals, or dairy was harmed in the making of our meal. Despite this fact it was delicious. We had tempura, famous Koya-san tofu, rice, tea, pickles, and a few dishes that I have no idea what they contained. While the lack of steak was troublesome, the meal was amazing. Everything there was delicous, there was not a single bad dish.

After we finished, the mother of the head priest came out to give us a history lesson. She was 84 years old and still very vital. Luckily for us she had earned an English Literature degree at Tokyo University in 1939 or so, and she spoke excellent English. She was great fun, describing both her own life in Koya-san and the history of the area, all the way back to old Kukai. She told us how Kukai didn't actually die, he just decided to start meditating in a cave nearby, and has been at it for over a thousand years! And then it was time for bed, as our wakeup call was 5:45 the next morning.

Next: I got up HOW EARLY?!?!