Mt. Fuji Sunrise

I took this picture on our recent camping trip to Lake Motosu. This is obviously a Mt. Fuji sunrise. I was up at 5:00 AM with my fellow photo enthusiast friend Ryan, and were lucky to have such a clear morning. We thought we were being pretty sneaky being the early worm, but when we arrived at our perch we realized we were late to the party. About 20 other photographers were there with their expensive cameras and tripods lined up in the 'good spots.' One guy drove 4 hours from his home, arriving just after midnight, whereupon he set up his tripod and camera, then ducked back into his car to wait in the warmth for hours before sunrise. The dedication of some of these Japanese photographers!

Some looked like serious hobbyists. The one thing I know about the Japanese is that if they have a hobby, no matter what it is or how good they are at it (or want to become) they go all out and buy the best gear. It's a "go strong or go home" mentality...which I think is good.

Back to the photo. This is somewhat of a famous vantage point. On the back of the 1000 yen note (roughly $10) there's a picture of Fuji and it's from the Lake Motosu vantage point.

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Harajuku: Pink Eye

I took this shot right before leaving for the States this summer and I've been sitting on it. As you can see, this girl whom I saw in Harajuku, is wearing pink color eye contacts...not a strange occurence in Harajuku. She was posing for a local magazine that highlights the fashion and trends of the Harajuku style. So like the hack that I am I stood behind the photographer (as did a few others) and snapped a few pictures.

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Harajuku: Peacock Feathers

This girl is really fascinating to me. She is obviously really into the Harajuku goth/moulin rouge dress up scene and she is Japanese, but she has these really pretty green/gray eyes...much lighter than the typical. She wasn't too interested in posing for anyone. She was sitting around a larger photography crew and was turning slightly away from us amateur hacks...but only slightly.

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Harajuku: Little Bo Peep

I found this girl hanging out with the "Free Hugs" people - a group of people who do just that, stand around offering to give free hugs to people. She was quiet and shy, but nice enough to pose for a picture. Check the main website for pictures of this girl. She's in full pink Little Bo Peep regalia. No pink sheep following her around, however.

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Harajuku: Bandaged Beauty

Harajuku is a funky part of town not too far from where I live. Young kids, mostly girls, gather on Sunday afternoons in costumes that represent everything from gothic-inspired, anime, Little Bo Peep, Lolita and everything in between. It's a great site to behold.

This girl here has dreadlocks, tattoos and bandages across her face. A very odd exterior, but soft features nevertheless.

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Dragonfly

This picture was taken on the same day as this picture of a drop of water, and this other picture of a drop of water. I was in the Imperial Palace gardens shooting for a good part of the morning on an extended business trip to Tokyo in October 2007. This dragonfly was just hanging out on this hedge and didn't seem to mind that I was following, watching, and shooting him. It was really cool. He was really big!

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Yet another water drop

You might think that I'm obsessed with water droplets, what with that other two shots of water drops that I've uploaded to the photo blog. Yes, you're right. But I couldn't help myself with my macro lens. It really does make it so easy to get up close to clearly see things like a drop of water. Anyway, the depth of field and the focus is the hardest part, of course. If you don't have a steady hand...which I don't...then it could make taking shots really hard.

Anyway, this time this photo was taken in Tokyo. It wasn't in a very peaceful place at all. It was along the side of the road on my way to the Imperial Palace...where I took this shot. It had rained the night before and despite the throng of pedestrians and the rumbling of traffic behind me, I was able to snap this shot. I promise this will be my last water droplet shot for a while...until the next time, right? This shot happens to be my background on my work laptop.

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The Big Buddha

On a recent trip to Kamakura, there stands what many consider to the be oldest outdoor statue of buddha in the world. Now this is a bit controversial, because I think every country boasts one of these. And until a few hundred years ago, it was an indoor statue. It would have stayed that way until some pesky typhoon came and knocked the enclosure over, leaving buddha exposed.

Anyway, this is kind of a cool place to come visit. I like this picture as I turned it into a black and white shot and blew out the white and darkened the blacks and grays. It gives it sort of a gritty feel.

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Flower Power

During my recent trip to San Francisco, I spent some time walking around the batteries that used to house bunkers which protected the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. Oddly enough they've devolved into late night hang out spots for vagrants and kids. Lots of broken bottles, grafiti, etc. Not too appealing.

This flower happened to be appealing, however. It was eagerly stretching out towards the sun in what seemed like full bloom.

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Asakusa Shrine

On one of our outings, we went to Asakusa Shrine here in Tokyo. I found myself having a hard time shooting because there were so many people and ultimately I couldn't get a good shot without people in the way. I sort of gave in and shot anyway.

I turned this shot into black and white and tried to darken the photograph a bit to lessen the prominence of the people. And as I have done a lot, I colorized the middle lantern.

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American Flag

I was on a dinner cruise on the San Francisco Bay and the weather couldn't have been more clear. A bit windy and cold, but I couldn't help but be outside. Everyone else seemed to spend more time inside, but I liked being outside to take in the views.

I was struck at how cool the waving flag was, whipping in the wind behind the boat. After taking the picture I felt like it would be a bit more interesting if I turned it into a black and white shot, darken the overall picture and then colorize the red and white parts of the flag. I think it turned out rather interesting.

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Kamakura Umbrella

This shot is obviously of a Japanese umbrella, taken at a rest stop at a hillside shrine in Kamakura, a resort town along coastal Japan. This also is one of Japan's most culturally significat cities.

I decided to shoot this shot because I saw someone else, who didn't speak English and I don't think spoke Japanese, was crouching down taking this picture. Because I'm a total hack and not below copying other people's work, I thought there must be some merit in snapping this...and I think there was.

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San Francisco Rust

I was in San Francisco recently on business and I challenged myself to get out and shoot as much as I could with the free time that I had. While shooting the well-known sites, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, were cool, I think I had more fun exploring things that were right under my nose - like the rusted links found in this picture. These links act as a guard rail so people don't fall into the bay below. The cracked and rusted metal caught my attention, which I thought would make an interesting subject for my macro lens.

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Tokyo Tower from Roppongi Hills

Roppongi Hills is a newish development that has a 52 story building - rather rare in earthquake prone Japan - with a city-view observatory. This has a wonderful view of Tokyo from an almost 360 degree view. Here is a shot of Tokyo Tower looking north and east.

I'm not sure how I feel about this shot. I think I like the idea of it and the ideal of what this shot could become. The execution I think is lacking. For one I was standing a few feet back from the glass, in which you can see faint reflections of people standing. That's too bad.

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Four

There is a place in Tokyo called Roppongi which I guess could be called the entertainment capital of Tokyo, especially for foreigners. In reality there are different "entertainment capitals" depending on your demographic. Anyway, On the back side of a large shopping, movie, restaurant complex is this cool lighted wall of glass with numbers spaced every few yards.

Anthon was running around wildly and we were having family night out so I didn't get to spend too much time shooting. I waited for a group of people walking in front of me to get the contrast of darkened, shadowy profiles of people in front of the large number four.

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Tokyo Mosque

With our move to Japan we didn't expect to get a view of a mosque. In fact, I didn't even know there was a mosque. But it has a prominent fixture in our home as we can see it from any room on the western side of our apartment. It's particularly beautiful in the evening and the sun sets behind it.

This shot was taken on one of our first nights here in our new place in Tokyo.

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Swirling water

Our family was in Evansville, Indiana visiting family for the holidays. While we were there we happened upon their really cool children's museum. They had a whirlpool where you could throw in these plastic blue balls and watch them swirl around and around.

This shot was taken without a tripod trying to catch a bit of motion. So it's not incredibly sharp, but it will have to do.

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Sunset at the Beach

This is a pretty simple shot taken at Ocean Park, between Santa Monica and Venice beaches. Nothing really more to add to the shot other than I think it was one of the more peaceful and serene sunsets I had seen in a while. The shadowed, black palm trees offer a nice contrast with the multi-colored sky in the background. This view just screams Southern California to me.

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Another drop of water

So, I love taking macro shots, but this one frustrates me. I like what I'm TRYING to do, but I think my execution is still lacking. I can't get the focusing quite right and so I'll shoot 100 shots and each shot can't quite get the droplet of water in perfect focus. So I have to do some digital manipulation, which is what I did here. It's fine.

But to say something positive about this shot, it's amazing to me that water has as much form as it does. I'm so used to seeing it go anywhere and everywhere, but it's cool to see it nestled on a leaf.

This shot was taken at The Getty Museum. This place is seriously one of my favorite spots in LA. Not only is it the site of my first date with Shelley, but it just has all you could ask for in a museum - great art, cool architecture, beautiful views of the city, and nice landscaped gardens.

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The Santa Monica Ferris Wheel

This is a shot that I've wanted to take for a long, long time. The last time I tried to take it, I brought my camera and my big tripod - only to find that I forgot the flash memory for my camera. Stupid! This time I made sure not to miss out.

The shot is rather easy to take - point and shoot and keep the lens open long enough to capture a long rotation of the ferris wheel. In this shot I left it open for about 10 seconds.

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Green apple

When I come to Japan on business, I get to stay at The Peninsula Hotel, an upscale hotel that just opened up in Tokyo in September. One of the great aspects about the service at this hotel is that the staff brings to your room two servings of a really great fruit each and every day. If you don't eat it, they bring in new fruit. I've had huge grapes, kiwi fruit, clementines, Japanese pears, etc. Over the weekend they brought me a couple of green apples, which became the subject of this picture.

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A drop of water

I actually took this shot today. I'm on an extended business trip to Japan and had the entire day free on Saturday. I lugged all of my photographic equipment all the way to Japan for just such an occassion.

It has rained the night before I took this shot and that meant plenty of opportunities to take pictures of leaves with little beads of water on them. I've never successfully shot one, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about this one. maybe it's the closest one I've taken to being remotely shaprly in-focus. This was taken inside the public gardens of the Imperial Palace. I took a lot of time looking for shots - nearly two hours. I had my iPod on and I tuned out the world while taking pictures. A very good day.

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Stuck and not happy

This picture was taken of Anthon when he was about 3-4 months old in February of 2006. We were on our way home from visiting my grandma in Santa Rosa. Back then, Anthon could sleep for hours upon hours in his rear facing child seat. We didn't want to wake him, but we wanted to know if he was awake. So prior to the shot attached below, I reached back and snapped a random shot with Shelley's digital camera just to see if he was awake. We looked at the shot and the face peering back had eyes open and a concerned look, wondering what in the world was in his face. So funny.

Anyway, I moved to the back seat to calm Anthon down. I love this picture because it really does capture his mood. He was not happy being stuck in his car seat, but he wasn't so unhappy as to really cry about it. His pursed lips was just about all the disapproval he could muster.

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Indian Bricks

This is just a shot of a pile of bricks at a roadside stop in India between New Delhi and Agra. I had just arrived in India the night before with my business school class and we had a day of leisure before we started our company visits. Talk about overstimulation! We couldn't keep our eyes off of the road...and I guess it's ironic that of all the pictures I took on the road to the Taj Mahal, the one that interests me most isn't shots of camels walking on the road or snake charmers...but a plain old pile of bricks.

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Shibuya at Night

I was in Japan a few weeks ago and I spent some time after work one night in the Shibuya area of Tokyo. Shibuya is known for being the hang out for the young. This shot is taking from Hachiko Square, near the main exit to the train and subway lines and the main entry point into the shops, restaurants and other nightlife of Shibuya.

The picture taken below is a panorama compiled from four individual shots I took with my Nikon. I then stitched the photos together using a really nice piece of free software called, Autostitch. All you need to do is take a number of pictures in succession with some overlapping scenes and then drop them into the program and after a while a panorama will appear.

Over the next few months, I will be spending a lot more time in Japan for work. I am taking my camera each time so that I can take more panoramas of places like the Imperial Palace and the Ginza area, etc.

A shot like this really needs to be seen in a much larger size. Download the full photograph by clicking on the image below.

A Butterfly, Up Close and Personal

So, another macro shot while we're on the subject. Shelley and I spent a long weekend in Utah. We were visiting with her grandparents and we spent the morning up at Payson Lakes in the mountains in southern Utah County. Tons of wild flowers, bees, butterflies and other insects. This little guy didn't seem to mind having a macro lens focusing in his face. He was more interested in the flower itself. I'm amazed at the level of detail. You think you have a good view of what a butterfly looks like until you see its nose and weird eyes and the long tongue.

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Translucent Red Leaf

I recently purchased a new macro lens, which allows me to get really close to my subject and take pictures. This is used for things like bugs, flowers, that sort of thing. Last weekend, I was able to use it for the first time while visiting Santa Rosa, California. My entire family was there to celebrate my Grandmother's 90th birthday. After the celebration, we took the kids to a park and I found a tree with dark leaves that glowed red in the sunlight. This is where I snapped this shot.

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Panic! in Seattle

This is the first shot I've taken this year that I thought I would throw up on the photo blog. It's quickly growing on me. At the time when I took it I didn't like it. But I'm in this colorizing phase where I'll take turn my color photos into black an white and then selectively add color to various sections of the photo...such as the red lettering above Pike's Market in Seattle.

The colored letters spell "panic" not for any other reason than I could do it easily with the available letters. That, and I really like the song Panic, by The Smiths. In case you're interested, Pete Yorn does a great cover of the song on his "Live at the Roxy" album. But I digress.

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Work Shall Set You Free

This is a picture of the front gate of one of the first concentration camps set up to imprison and eventually murder political prisoners of the Nazy regime, including Jews. It in the city of Dacau, which is a suburb of Munich in the south of Germany.

It's ironic that the inscription says "work shall set you free" because rarely did that happen. This was a sobering place, especially when you consider the conditions in which they were all forced to live...and some die.

I thought this shot looked better in black and white than in color. And something about skewing the composition fit with the mood of the day. I darkened the photo up a bit to make the iron in the bars stand out a bit more.

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Salvaging a Bad Day

I moved to Tokyo, Japan in September of 2000 for a 10 month assignment with work. My previous experience with being in Tokyo was as an intern in 1998 and I lived in the middle of nowhere and had no money to explore. So I was eager to get out of the city this time around.

2 hours by train outside of Tokyo is a place called Nikko, an alpine get-away that used to be a retreate for the Shogun rulers of Japan in the 1600's. It's full of temples and is one of the neatest places in all of Japan.

Well, on my trip up to Nikko, it was raining and it was crowded and it was a miserable experience. I had wanted to visit Lake Chuzenji, pictured below, but all I could see of the lake was this bridge. I couldn't even see a huge waterfall nearby. I could only hear it and feel the mist. The fog was so thick I couldn't even see the stupid waterfall.

I like this picture becuase it's simple and it's bleak...kind of like my day. If the fog were any thicker and the bridge any longer I would half expect the bridge to just vanish like those baseball players when they walked in the corn in the movie "Field of Dreams." The other reason why I like this picture is because it was one of the first few sets of pictures I took with my first digital camera. It was a 1.3 megapixel camera from Olympus. The thing took a few seconds to capture an image and a few more seconds to recover so you could take another image. In hindsight, the image quality wasn't anywhere a film camera, but the "cool" factor was certainly high.

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Within the Temples of Angkor Wat

I never did the backpacking-through-Europe thing before I started my career. And to some extent I always regretted it. So, when I moved with my company to Japan, I used my location as a launching pad for travel to interesting parts of Asia.

This photo was taken in Cambodia seeing what I think is one of the most awesome sights in the world, Angkor Wat. This photo could have been taken anywhere in the world, but trust me on this, it was taken in Cambodia. I liked seeing the sun pouring in on this large wooden support used to prop up the heavy cut-stones that are caving in. In fact Angkor is a city full of temples that are being destroyed by nature. It's an amazing place to see giant trees whose root systems are growing and enveloping walls. It's really a sublime place.

This shot does it for me only because of the natural framing of the darkened walls in the foreground set against a nicely positioned wooden support set at a slight angle.

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The 18th at Coronado

I'm a horrible golfer, but I'd like to think that golf can be time well spent, especially when you're witness to a spectacular sunset.

In 2002, a group of friends played a round of golf at a public course on Coronado Island in San Diego. We were approaching the green on the 18th hole when I noticed the deep colors of the sunset reflecting off the lake. Everything in the background was shadowed black, including the ducks. The only color was was the sunset and that light which reflected off the water. It was truly a nice moment.

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Cabo Cactus

This picture was taken in Cabo San Lucas of a lone cactus on a small sandy bluff overlooking the beach and the Gulf of California. I shot this picture in the morning and, like most of my shots, didn't do anything for me. I started playing around with the colorization and though that even though the blue sky behind it was so clear and deep...if I made that black and white and intensified the green of the cactus I might come up with some funky. Well, it certainly is funky. I think that's why I like it.

This trip to Cabo in 2005 was an incentive trip because Shelley and her sales district was one of the top districts in the company. Shelley was pregnant with Anthon at it was one of the last big vacations before I started my MBA and we became parents.

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The CN Tower of Toronto

In honor of me being in Toronto on business this week, I thought I'd post a picture I took of the CN Tower, one of the tallest structures in North America. The views from up top are spectacular. There's a section with a clcear, plexi-glass like flooring that allows you to see to the ground. Let me assure you, it takes a few seconds to assure your brain that you're not going to fall if you step on it.

I took this shot while I was on a month-long sprint through parts of Canada helping to promote a new mutual fund my company launched in April, 2006. I had some free time on a Saturday and, as you can see, the weather was perfectly clear.

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Sunrise along the Mediterranean

I remember this shot well. I had been up for hours watching the Presidential election coverage in our hotel room in Spain. It was like Christmas morning. Shelley wouldn't let me get up too early, but I just couldn't wait to see how the election results turned out. (By the way, election day television for me is the best television in the world.) I was up at 4:00 AM and quietly turned on the TV.

This shot was taken as the sun came up in Marbella, Spain - a Mediterranean coastal resort town. I'd never seen a sky so vivid with color. This picture was doctored a bit only to intensify the color of the sky and to completely blacken out the buildings in the foreground.

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St. Peter's Basilica

This is the inside of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Shelley and I were here in 2005 on our trip through Germany and Italy. What I remember most about this visit was us stalking a priest to get him to bless a rosary for a friend of Shelley's family.

This shot initially didn't do much for me until I put it into sepia tone and darkened the shadows. The result was more pronounced rays of light pouring into the Cathedral which constrast nicely against the general dark tone of the rest of the image.

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Disney Hall, another angle

Another shot of Disney Hall, taken on the same day as the one below. Again, the lines of Disney Hall offer so many wonderful photographic opportunities.

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The St. Louis Arch

This picture was taken in December, 2006. Shelley, Anthon, Shelley's sister Rachel and I were driving back to Evansville, Indiana after attending Shelley's sister Diana's wedding. Got all that?

This was my first time to St. Louis and I couldn't leave without stopping to see the Arch. The weather was cloudy and cold, but with a little software manipulation, the shot below actually turned out OK.

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Disney Hall

Disney Hall is the relatively new symphony hall used by the LA Philharmonic, and it is one of my favorite buildings in all of Los Angeles.

This shot was taken after a concert in November of 2003 with my old 3 megapixel Sony CyberShot. I love the lines of this building. While this shot is a bit abstrac, it is one of my favorites.

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Rome, right before the rain

Photography is an emerging interest of mine and I'd like to share some of my favorite shots from over the years.

My first photo is one that I didn't really think much of until a few months ago. I was fooling around with Adobe Fireworks and I found that if I turned the original photo (shot in color) into a black and white shot, then I could colorize parts of the Italian flag and superimpose it on the black and white photo. I played around with the lighting and voila, I created a shot that I really thought was cool.

You can download the full image by clicking on the image.