外大際

This weekend was the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies festival, AKA, the 外大際 gai dai sai. It included a lot of live music and dancing and some cafe's and stuff. If you've ever seen the cultural festival episode of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi or - though any anime about high-school will have a festival episode or two - you know the basic idea.

I went on Saturday for a bit, but the act was not particularly good, so I left about only being there for about half an hour. They were supposedly doing go-go dancing, but it looked much more like para para than anything else. Further, they didn't seem to be really confident of themselves, but it was probably the first time they did their routine in front of a hundred (maybe two hundred?) people, so that's fairly understandable.
I took some pictures, but they didn't really come out well. The harsh sunlight was making it hard to get their faces to expose properly. If you look, you'll see the exposure bias was set to +2/3 stops, and I'm not really sure when that happened, but it's another thing I need to watch out for in the future. I very rarely use positive exposure biases.

After this, I went to a shiatsu lesson, but I wasn't in the right mood for it, and I felt like "Urgh, end already...". Probably because I stayed up until 5AM that day playing games with Yanavy, a French girl from my school's level two class. I think she speaks four or five languages fluently.

Wake up, go to club stuff, and got this picture of Melissa lookin' good, as she tends to do, while we were all getting ready to leave. Taken simply as an excuse to play with my new flash, though. The SB-600 has a head that both twists and rotate on the vertical axis, so you can do bounce shots while holding the camera vertically. I don't know quite what I did in this picture, because I certainly didn't bounce it. I guess it's direct flash?

Came back later on Sunday, around 7PM, and watched an hour of people dancing around. They were much, much better than the first group I saw, but they had quite a bit more invested in it and it was a larger group. This is probably why they were put on the main day of the festival during the peak of the students being around.

They had maybe eight different outfits for each of the ten or so different people, and a couple of times they just changed on stage behind a big pink tarp.
The thing that confuses me about this: where do you find a big pink tarp? That's not really a standard color for tarps, you know?

Now, I don't want you to think the entire set of dance routines was just a bunch of women in short skirts shaking their stuff around - though it was, for the most part.
Two guys came on stage and did some breakdancing, which I couldn't see due to being fairly far back. They looked fairly in shape, but they didn't really have any costuming, which might have helped.

They did a bunch of songs that I would consider serious for breakdancing, but they also did the theme song from 崖の上のぽにょ Gake no Ue no Ponyo which is pretty cutesy, as well as Cruel Angel's Thesis from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both were met with cheers.

One of the performances had this chick (right side of the left-aligned picture) in it, and she's probably the most buff Japanese woman I've seen yet. She also gets bonus points for being pretty cute anyway.

At the end, I saw a bunch of the dancers (right) kind of... dancing around, in the open, and I took the opportunity to actually get a picture of a few of the whole outfits.

I also spotted one of the other study abroad students trying to pick up some girls. I don't know how this turned out, but I think he was fairly drunk while they were fairly not. Note the expression of the girl to his right.

While the obon dance was going on, there was someone providing cues for the announcers, but I guess she didn't have them in a useful format to read from a distance, so she was furiously scribbling away on this big notebook and showing them their cues like that. Pretty nifty idea, I thought.

Jidai Matsuri

Gallery links at the bottom of this post!

Jidai Matsuri (時代祭り) is a parade that includes elements from the 1,100 years or so that Kyoto was the capital of Japan. For perspective, this is nearly five times the length that the United States has been recognized as a country. On the other hand, Commodore Perry might have a couple of things to say about these kinds of things.

In any case, there's really not much more that can be said about the parade. I think I prefer Apple Blossom over this one, as at least the Grand Parade has girls in short skirts in quantity. Massed cheerleaders are awfully hard to beat, you know?

I think my favorite part of the Jidai Matsuri parade was when one guy's horse decided he wanted to go the other way for a while. They stopped the whole remaining part of the procession while the handlers got the horse to turn around. This happened with three or four of them, but one took the entire six-lane street to turn around.
There were a couple of touchy spots where I was worried about the stability of the horses, as they kept ending up going sideways by the corner, and if you've been around horses, you know they don't strafe well.
Actually, I think you can circle-strafe in Dynasty Warriors, but... Well, you can do a lot of things in Dynasty Warriors.

Galleries

The first gallery contains all the pictures I thought were particularly good. This is the gallery I'd recommend to anybody in general. This is the top 20% or so of the pictures I took, and I really like some of them. If you just need more pictures of the parade than are here, there's the...

Second gallery, which includes the first gallery and a further ~150 of the pictures that I took at Jidai Matsuri. It consists of pretty much all the pictures I thought weren't boring. I took another 200 or so that came out just fine, but they're not worth including due to space restrictions and me being lazy. Mostly the latter.
My email is at the bottom of this page if you have any questions, and you should also feel free to leave a comment. Either way.

(ヴァレンテナと言う直おばあさんになる人が読んでいたら、このページのギャラリーを無視してもいいよ。ばあさんのためのギャラリーも準備できているんだからね)

Matsuri-try

There was a festival today.

People marched.
I took pictures.

It rained.
I'm wet.

Some horses came by.
I have 600 pictures.

There is another festival today.

Gion Matsuri Pictures - Finally!

The Gallery

I finally got some time last night - well, this morning - and finished sorting through the bulk of the Gion festival pictures. This morning (after some sleep) I went through and captioned them, did some final processing, and now they're up in the gallery. Maybe not the best selection if you just care about the festival, but I was excited by the festival as I was by all the gear people were using.

Most of the pictures make sense, but these two require a little explanation. These bizarre things at left are used to make sure the float stays floating forward. It allows a guy on each side to turn the float ever so slightly so that the float doesn't end up driving off into a building or something. I originally thought that it was so the wheels wouldn't fall off or something, but it's nothing quite so stupid.

These girls were part of the three kids' floats that I swear were chasing Aaron and I around. At first, we got a little lost, heard drums, and decided to see what was going on. So we saw them, got some pictures, and left.
Then, we got where we were trying to go, and right as we were about to go into the store, we heard them come around the corner.
When we came out of that store, they were back. Going into another store, they were still stomping around.
We come out of that store half an hour later and they come around the corner again. Creepy stalker munchkins.

Anyway, the festival was decently fun, and I got some mango ice cream.
In other news, the point of the festival is to protect the citizens of Kyoto from some disease that was rather endemic at the time. Some of the floats have spear-shaped things on top, and this is theoretically to kill the evil spirits, I think. We got all the history and stuff about a week ago, and I was really only interested in taking pictures. I need not worry, though, as I think 80% of the population of Kyoto was taking pictures.
Anyway, the festival itself is a week-long event, but the parade is sort of the climax. I was too busy with school stuff to go to any of it, except this, which they canceled school for.

Anyway, check out the gallery for a bunch of pictures.

Gion Matsuri, with an Oops

So I took quite a few pictures today. 627 to be precise.
Well, 628 if you really want to be precise, but the bowl of peanut butter and jelly rice doesn't really relate to the rest of what happened today. Today was the parade for Gion Matsuri, and it's a pretty big affair. There's about a week of lead-up to it where random people from around town build the floats out of various bits of stuff. There are around 30 different floats, and the parade lasts from around 9AM to well after noon. The floats are pretty, if not exactly to my taste. And I'll admit I was a little creeped out by the plastic people mounted in all but the lead float. But! It's pretty neat as parades go and everybody takes lots and lots of pictures.

I'm still working on translating some stuff for my last class tomorrow, so I haven't had time to sort through the pictures, but I think I got some pretty good shots...

...

... at 3200 ISO.

[seppuku noises (whatever those are)]

Here's the story of how it happened:
So last night I was demonstrating to Aaron what difference ISO makes and why it is that you would never want to take pictures you care about at 3200 ISO. The noise reduction required to get a vaguely decent picture completely drains all the color out of it, and all the detail is sort of smudgy. If you use RAWs or turn off noise reduction, you just have a very, very noisy picture.
If you open up that picture, you'll see it looks very much as if I took it with my cell phone. Except my cell phone doesn't let you change settings like this, so you can't screw up in quite this fashion.
[Edit: It would seem you can't see the noise itself very well, as the picture was downsized to 1600 pixels in width, which is about 1/3 of how big it was to begin with.]

Ahem.

I have 627 very, very noisy pictures using six more stops of ISO than was necessary, given the lighting conditions.
I had been wondering why it was that my camera seemed to be over-exposing things and using tiny, tiny apertures. "Gee, 1/4000th of a second is odd in this light..." is something I thought a number of times, but I never thought to check my ISO setting. As much as I want to say something like "Man, what an amateur mistake!" it would be entirely too accurate.
But as long as I learn from it, it's a good thing, right? Right! I mean, at least I've made this mistake during something that happens annually. Imagine this at a wedding!

Next time, I'll be sure to check my WB and ISO settings in addition to physical checks and cleaning.

So, here's today's lesson for everybody:

If you're going to show someone what not to do,
make sure to not do it yourself.

祇園祭 (Gion Matsuri)

Aaron Dean and I are going to head over early and see if we can't get a good spot to get pictures of the opening ceremonies for Gion festival. Here's hoping!

Slow Week, part two

I did some wandering on Sunday and got these two pictures, of which type you'll probably be seeing a lot of in the next few days.

At left is a float under construction. As you can see, they don't so much build the float as much as bondage half a forest. Very Japanese, I think.

At right are some women who, after some tittering and debating among themselves, agreed to pose for me.

Also, I had some sushi, which was pretty normal for the most part. Saw a couple new dishes, such as black sesame pudding and somem kind of coleslaw sushi.

But what really took the cake* was the hamburger sushi. You can see it at right. The sign in the background has the name of the store, then under that, hanbaagu which is "hamburger" in Japanese.

Pantyshots and gropers

I walked my friend back to the train station last night, since it was nearly midnight, and when we left, there were two guys standing outside my building's door, just kind of chatting. Eh.
So I picked up two $1-menu things, had dinner, and went home.

When I got back nearly 45 minutes later, they were still there. It was pretty warm and rather humid outside, so I stopped and asked:
Me: "Why not go up to your room, with the air conditioner and whatnot? It's kind of warm out here, don't you think?"
Short guy: "The air is bad."
Me: "Oh, I know what you mean. I kind of like the way the wind feels, too. But it's still pretty hot out here, yeah?"
Tall guy: "But it feels nice."
Once I stopped moving and was just standing and talking, the temperature was perfect. Walking up and down hills, though, it was a touch muggy. I stood and talked to these two for about ten minutes, and then one of them made a gesture I didn't recognize.
Short guy: "Man, I can't wait for the Gion festival..." This is when he did the gesture.
Me: "Wait, what? What's that?"
Short guy: "What's what?"
Me: "This." I did my best to imitate the gesture. "What's that?"
Short guy: "It's... man, I shouldn'tve said that..."
Tall guy: "That's his groping motion."
Me: "Sorry, what?"
Tall guy: "It's kind of like..." and this is when made another gesture, though this one I at least recognized: he took his phone, but it between his legs, and tried to make a camera noise.
Me: "Oh, like chikan?" (chikan are train gropers, generally)
Tall guy: "Yeah! I'm not nearly as good as he is though."
Me: "So you guys are iya na yatsu?" (... basically "bad people")
Tall guy: "Yeah, pretty much."

So apparently, you need to watch out for gropers during festivals. News to me. One guy was a stuntman, by the way. I thought that was pretty cool.