Japan Cherry Blossom

[Andy]

I took lots of photos in the night using the timed exposure settings on my Cannon A620.

I'm not too sure of the best way to set this camera up for night time photos without flash but I tried this method for the first time on 13th April 2006 for photos of the Cherry blossom around the castle here in Kanazawa Japan. The scenes were very beautiful with the pink blossoms in the trees with illumination from lights, the crowds of people, the castle, the reflections in the water of the moat, cars on the road below and the food being cooked at the entrances. A photographers paradise I think. There were lots of photo enthusiasts with tripods and expensive-looking camera gear around.

Anyway, here is one of my best photos of the night:



I think I could do better if I used manual focus but I have to study the manual to work out how to do it. I still have a few days left to take some more photos 

Here is a daylight picture:



This is a clip from within a full-zoom hand-held snap on auto across a river. The full resolution pictures are excellent IMHO.

[Hope]

I was out of town for the weekend our cherry blossoms were in full glory. I would have loved to gotten some pictures to show you all.

Your pictures are great. For a non SLR your camera is wonderful. You can see the detials in the trees. I am impressed.

[SensoVision]

you're really in photographer's paradise!
And you've made great shot Andy, I'm jaleous about it seriously! wish we had something like this park in our city... here parks are dark and dangerous place to visit in the night

[Andy]

I took some more today in daylight. I'm going to post some on my blog as smaller pics including some of the castle. I can post higher res pics here if you like but it is hard work dealing with all the photos as you guys probably know too. Only a few are really good. At the moment I am very busy creating content for my sites, learning to write and speak Japanese and move house again 

[TexasLady]

Andy, the cherry blossom pic is so beautiful and the details are wonderful.   you really did good work on that with the content, etc. 

Gotta say it brings back memories, but not of night time cherry blossoms, only daytime.

[Andy]

Here's some more pictures:
http://blog.urgentclick.com/2006/04/18/japan-cherry-blossom-sakura-season/

The blossoms look pretty in the daytime, but at night it is a stunning experience around the castle. They do a good job of illuminating things to give a great contrast of color against the dark night sky.

[SensoVision]

These photos are stunning, Andy, maybe you can post bigger version of them here as have offered before?

[Andy]

These photos are stunning, Andy, maybe you can post bigger version of them here as have offered before?

These are my favorite 2 images. To see bigger images, please click on the thumbnails:

[SensoVision]

pond one is really good one, you can even submit it to some contest IMHO of course if this photo was made not in popular photographic location.

[12noon]

These photos are great. I like the way the trees reflect in the water.
 

[Andy]

Thanks. Night shots can be impressive but you need a tripod to keep the camera dead still during the timed exposure. But maybe with image stabilization it is less of a problem? I bet you are looking forward to getting hold of your new camera.

Yesterday I noticed my lens was fogged up, something I normally forget to check so I breathed on it and cleaned with a tissue being careful to remove any flecks of debri. This method seemed to work fine.

One tip for your new camera is to buy a fast memory card. The cheap Kingston memory cards are really slow and make you wait seconds between shots. High res pictures have big file sizes so you need a fast card to speed up the saving and download times.

I bought a 1GB Sandisk Ultra II SD Card which seems fast enough and has plenty of room for 100's of shots plus I can capture bursts of video. They do an even faster one but the mid-range is OK unless you need to do rapid fire shots such as for sport?

[12noon]

Thanks for the memory card tip. I do have one here, but think it might be broken and might have to buy a new one. I will do as you said if i do have to get another.

[SensoVision]

Andy, looking at your picture more I would like to give you suggestion about it, try to crop it so picture would be symmetric relative to shore. It would cut some black space at the bottom of the picture which doesn't present any useful or appealing information for eyes.
Check the picture I'm attached to see what I mean. Feel free to say if you don't like my version, I just tried to show the way how to make picture more appealing, but it doesn't mean that it would everyone think so and I appreciate to know if it's so

Yesterday I noticed my lens was fogged up, something I normally forget to check so I breathed on it and cleaned with a tissue being careful to remove any flecks of debri. This method seemed to work fine.

this is good solution when you don't have anything better nearby, but be sure to use microfiber or cloth for cleaning glasses at least as you can easily scratch your lens which would lower quality of your photograps. I advice you to check this post where I've told about liquid I'm using to clean up lenses: http://forum.weblamp.net/index.php/topic,4933.0.html
I've also tried pre-moistorized tissues from Carl-Zeiss lately and wasn't satisfied as they really remove all grease very effecitvely but leave some traces which I was only able to remove with my LensPen which is also very good solution for cleaning lens when you're at they field. It's doesn't cost that much but really could save situation if you accidently put your thumb on the lens...

One tip for your new camera is to buy a fast memory card. The cheap Kingston memory cards are really slow and make you wait seconds between shots. High res pictures have big file sizes so you need a fast card to speed up the saving and download times.

I bought a 1GB Sandisk Ultra II SD Card which seems fast enough and has plenty of room for 100's of shots plus I can capture bursts of video. They do an even faster one but the mid-range is OK unless you need to do rapid fire shots such as for sport?

Agree with Andy about buying fast card. But I'm not sure about 1Gb, you probably don't need that much everyday, and it's always better to use full capacity of your card as it has it's lifetime, e.g. if you make only 200 mb of photos each time and than move them to your computer, camera would keep on writing to same physical space on your SD card, after some this part of your flash card would be not useable...
I also had bad experience with two 1Gb card from Transcend so better avoid this brand, first was seen as 512mb card after few uses, and second becom read only card after 4 months of use, but since I had some photos which I prefer not to show to service center team I had to live it to myself
I have very good experience with Panasonic cards which you've ordered for me, they still both serves me very well and they are pretty fast, and I also have Pretec 512mb card 122x which is working perfectly(actually as other devices from this brand, e.g. card reader and 2 USB sticks).
So maybe buy two 512mb or 256mb cards instead of 1Gb at least if one become broken you have spare one with you.
I never used Sandisk myself but it seems to be very good brand and I always hear good feedback about them so maybe try it's worth to try it.

[Andy]

Your cropped version looks better I think. I need to get hold of a lens cleaning cloth like you suggested.

p.s. tissues seem to be the only way to get my laptop screen clean and free of smears.

Do you clean the cloth?

[SensoVision]

Do you clean the cloth?

as for pre-moistorized one I think it had a lot of spiritus in it(according to smell) and I take new one just for test, I'm pretty sure that it couldn't become dirty from my one lens which has only a bit of dirt on it. As for microfiber I've washed it many times and it doesn't loose it's qualities at least not yet.

[Andy]

More flowers...

http://blog.urgentclick.com/2006/06/24/japanese-iris-garden-in-%e3%81%86%e3%81%9f%e3%81%a4%e3%82%84%e3%81%be/

Stuff like this (the tree is a Japanese Maple that takes many years to grow to anywhere near this size):

[SensoVision]

it's really interesting to see how some plants which sold in pots and cost good money here grow in the open ground. They also look much better in natural environment than here.
I really admire folks who make such beautiful places.
Link posted by Andy really worth visiting!

BTW Andy, there is something wrong with the blog script I guess, as I have already tried to post these pictures on your blog for about one week ago, and today I've tried again but failed... maybe you can check it out?

[Andy]

Hi senso, are you having trouble posting image links in the comments? Please clarify and I will check it out.

[SensoVision]

nope, just plain text reply, when I hit post button I've got "No reply from server" first I thought that it's kind of ISP problem but it persist and I can view the rest of your blog without any problem...

[Andy]

Thanks for letting me know about this. It seems like wordpress is getting many timeout problems lately. I spent along time tracing the cause of 2 of these today.

The problem area is: http://blog.urgentclick.com/wp-comments-post.php

in this case I think. The problems seem to be when the script accesses external servers to ping etc. then it freezes.

Another hidden problem with using free scripts  I guess Moveable Type may be worth looking at?

[Andy]

I managed to update my blog today with interesting pictures of the "Fire Festival" 100kms from where we live. There is also a post showing the various Smilies available in WordPress I would like to have some kind of reference guide to the codes.

http://blog.urgentclick.com/

So far I only posted the daytime pics since I have a lot extending into the early hours of the night. So these will be in a future blog post.

There are some big firework displays due which I hope to post photos about soon too