Japan 2008: Day 4

Day four in Japan had us doing our first tour – we spent the afternoon at several historical spots in Kyoto. The temples and shrines are beautiful! We celebrated Jason’s birthday by going out for some delicious food…Chinese food! 🙂 Pictures published in the fourth Japan gallery (sadly they had to be down-sized a bunch before uploading…the Internet access here on Okinawa at the Zanpamisaki Royal Hotel is really slow).

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Japan 2008: Day 3

Our third day in Japan had us waking up in Tokyo, and checking out of the very lavish Prince Sakura hotel to start our walking tour of Tokyo with my friend Andrew Shuttleworth. We saw a variety of places around the city of Tokyo, and by the end of the day we had the blisters to show for it! Warning: many of these pictures are of technology, which some of you may find boring – but I was in geek heaven. Check out the photo gallery…(comments have been enabled on the day three gallery, as an experiment, so if you’d like to comment on the photos, please feel free).

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Japan 2008: Day 2

Our day two Japan photos are up, this time chronicling our journeys from Kyoto to Yokohama to Tokyo. We spent the afternoon in Yokohama – initially we were going to head for a place called Sea Paradise, but when we got to the station the cab driver told us it would cost 10,000 yen to get there – $100 CAD and an hour’s worth of our time. Both factors were steep, so we decided we’d skip that and spend the afternoon around Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan.

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We’re keeping so busy that I haven’t had much time to edit photos…and my Dell XPS M1330 is starting to make louder and louder whining noises – in a quiet room, it’s really noticeable and really irritating. <sigh> Time to call Dell when I return to Canada…

Japan 2008: Day 1

Our first full day in Japan was focused on one thing: SUMO! We had tickets (thanks James!) to the second-last day of the sumo tournament being held in Osaka. Off we went! I took a great deal of photos, and heavily culled them all, but it was difficult to not have a rather sizable collection of sumo photos (no pun intended) remain. I only kept the best though, so hopefully they capture some of the action that we saw!

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Japan 2008: Day 0

These are our “day zero” photos, which was our travel and arrival day…although technically we lost a day and a half with the 15 hour time zone change and the 14 hours of travelling (including the layover in Vancouver) so this is more like day zero/one. Not a lot here in the way of interesting photos, but I share them with you nonetheless. 🙂

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The Question of Point and Shoot Cameras

My friend Ed Hansberry made a post to the Mobius mailing list, where we were discussing digital SLR cameras, asking whether or not he was the only one that liked point and shoot (P&S) cameras. This was my reply.

Ed,

I think everyone that has a DSLR also has a P&S – the two technologies are not mutually exclusive in any way. I never leave my P&S behind, even if I’m bringing my DSLR, but I will sometimes leave my DSLR behind and only use my P&S. P&S cameras are great, but there are some things they’re not so good at:

  • fast shutter release (for getting that picture right away – even the worst DSLR is faster than the fastest P&S)
  • flexible lens choices (though there are some P&S cameras with amazing zoom)
  • low-light photography (noise free, focusing without much light)
  • super-sharp images (I love my Canon SD 870, but the image quality it has pales in comparison to any DSLR)

On the other hand, P&S cameras have video while “real” DSLRs do not. The best camera you have is the one you have on you – so there have been many instances where my P&S camera got great pictures that my DSLR did not simply because I have my P&S on me. Continue reading The Question of Point and Shoot Cameras

Amsterdam 2007 Photos Published

At the end of November I was fortunate to be invited to Microsoft’s Mobius conference, so Ashley and I decided to go a few days early and see the sites in Amsterdam. Here are the pictures from our journey. We’ve added comments on many of these pictures because we discovered that if you use Picasa’s comment feature, it embeds it into the EXIF comment field and Smugmug extracts that and shows it under the photo. Cool!

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Exploring Snow, January 2008

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The snow was fresh this morning, so I decided to step into my backyard and take a few pictures of it. These are also my first public photos with the Nikon D300 (an amazing camera!).