Takayama:
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Fantastic, Jez-san. How high is that pass? Still a fair bit of snow around.
Did you sample any of those? 
Bookmarks location for future visit.
I’d have to look it up. I was lucky that the last snowfall swept across Nagano-ken the night I stayed in Narai. The next morn the ground was blanketed with clear sunny skies for my walk. Fresh snow and views for miles.
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I did indeed. I wish I knew more about sake and what’s what though.
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For sure. I wasn’t sure whether to post here or in the travel thread like I did before. My first time to try the Nakasendo and Shirakawa-go, both were very popular with tourists and plenty of English help online. I’d been to Takayama 15 years earlier, it was way more tourist-friendly this time around.
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Nice photo 
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I got a Microsoft Surface 2 Laptop when I was in USA.
It was not cheap, but it is fantastic. Really worth a close look.
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Love the macro stuff. Awesome
Something from my time working recently in the Phillipines.
That praying mantis shrimp almost broke my lens. The last photo is a Chromodoris Magnifica Nudibranch. It’s only about 3cm in length.
It is is a difficult thing to photograph.
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Did you have a massive light source? Those pictures came out really bright for underwater stuff! Awesome!
Nah no light sources or shadows .
They were shallow in very clear water. Maybe 5 - 10m. But the “vis” can go on for 40+ meters.
It’s hard to fathom such a thing unless you actually experience the rapture of the deep, when your 40 fathoms down!
All hand held with either a Canon G11 or G10 using an Ikelite housing or canon housing.
I used super macro & close up wet lens on the end of the housing for the nudibranch.
The extremely narrow depth of field due to the very wide aperture & close up lenses allowed me to highlight the rhino pores. They are literally mm in length. Needless to say, I shot this a few times to get it this way.
I am perhaps most proud of this photo.
Nudibranchs are very slow moving animals but they are so small and you need to know what / how to find them. I have spent a few years chasing them.
The sardines were shot just after sun up in Marbal off Cebu with the plenty of light. It was absultely awesome with literally millions of these tiny fish swirling around you, moving as one almost uniform life force.
The peacock mantis shrimp was actually a pretty lucky shoot as I was in the right place at the right time. They are elusive and super fast. They also also known for smashing camera lenses with a fast punch that is often described like a bullet.
I white balance manually underwater off my dive computer or the sand - but also do a tweak in post to alter it slightly to be more real.
What the camera sees & what I see are a little different due the cameras limitations. Light is very tricky under water & you lose the red part of the spectrum.
Sand, serge and current can all become a problem as does running out of air.
Getting the bends is something that’s very real when you chase the perfect photo in crazy down currents in Indo and to a lesser extend Phillo.
I’m off to Bali during the bye weekend & will be testing the D800 with a 105mm macro lens.
I do have a flash gun for that, but it isn’t easy to use and a work in progress. I learnt how to do most stuff ambient light, but have tried to use flash a little and also underwater video lights.
It’s a blast. Can’t wait to look into the eyes of some big sharks again. Of course my wife freaks out thinking I’m gonna die, I tell her that if it happens ill at least be happy. Ha
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Wow, cool stuff, thanks for sharing!
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That’s an awesome experience you had! It does look a lot deeper.
Personally i’ve been playing with two new toys. I bought a heap of new and some second hand filters whilst in Japan and i’ve also bought myself 3 softboxes. Can’t post any of these photos cause my partner said no (they are all of her).
I’m awaiting a good night to do some astro photography again and if the weather gives me a good storm i’ll have a go with that too. Also bought myself a really good cpl filter. My previous one was $10 bucks on ebay. You can tell the difference between good and cheap. The good one actually works and doesn’t tint everything!
We should do a thread for all the other photos we took to get that final shot. Particularly when on holidays I will take two or three photos with my settings then flick across to auto for one in case i’ve completely stuffed it up.
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Was the Yashica a twin lens reflex’s ?
I managed to find a medium format one a few years back and shot a few rolls of B&W through it. Found it way easier and friendlier to use than the Hasselblad. The optics weren’t great but the lenses had this soft romantic feel and ugly people looked sexier. I lent it too this bar maid I had the hots for in Glebe and she never returned it. Plus my Gf would have butchered me has she found out I’d given it too someone else. Haha that’s life .
Still I miss that Yashica. Best $15 ever spent.
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Haha Well yeah, I have done like four / five hours of diving over two years to get one or two good shoots of a whale shark. Even then I’m not happy with it.
I used to dive professionally so I had a lot of oops to take good photos. I’m also a pretty harsh of my own work so keep on going till I’m happy, problem is that it might take two hundred shots,
You could never be this choose with film right. It would be waaaaaay to expensive and it already costs a ■■■■■■ fortune.
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Cool vision.
No, it’s just a little 35-ME fixed lens. Zone focus, Auto exposure that tries to shoot normally at f/8 and is at least one stop under exposed, probably because the old mercury batteries were a different voltage. There’s also a fair chance that as the new battery starts to flatten the exposure will constantly change, lol. I put a 10-stop ND on it for a few shots to force it to shoot at F/2.8 but then the lack of precise focus became an issue. I also told the camera some lies re iso to have a sort of crude exposure comp, which actually kind of worked ok. It’s fun to try to get the brain working to think of ways and means to force the camera into some form of manual control.
I think, but I’m not quite sure, that I may be able to get some aperture control by shooting in flash mode, but then I’d be stuck with a fixed shutter speed. Can’t quite get my head around that yet.
Here’s the old beastie.
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