Resting Places

Trying another post from the iPhone, this time with photos.
Yesterday, my wife and I went to put flowers on her dad’s grave. He’s interred at a beautiful temple / cemetary near our house. We took a quiet walk around the grounds and I took a few photos, keeping others privacy foremost in mind [...]

A Little Bit More

Here’s another couple of shots done with Camera Bag:
This is the cinema filter:
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This is the Holga filter:
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I’m really digging the Holga filter.

Toy Camera Phenom

A couple of weeks ago I went down to the park for the annual Hanami festivities. This year, for the first time in a long, long time, I didn’t take a camera with me. Instead I decided to put my iPhone’s camera through the paces. More specifically, I wanted to see what [...]

Street Photos

JPG has put out the first theme for their next issue – Street.  The editors have put in a clause mentioning that this is meant to be examples of Street Photography, not photos of streets; Street Photography is candid, natural photography, usually done with a minimum of set-up or apparatus.  The goal is to capture [...]

Intimate vs. Private

JPG is a good magazine.  It’s a good place for aspiring photographers to submit to; it’s a good place for fans of photography to see some of the best, newest, freshest, non-commercial work around; it’s a good place for supporters of internet freedoms like expression and community to gather and communicate their ideas.  It’s a [...]

Whale Shark

Fish
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

Ok, last Okinawa photo. Maybe. I took this at the Churaumi Aquarium; they have three whale sharks in this massive tank, along with sharks and stingrays and multitudes of little fishes.
Disclosure: The quality on this photo is not quite what I would have wanted, but I have [...]

Back in Town

We’re back.
It was a pretty good vacation; some bad things, but mainly good.  Although, my absolute favorite part was the look on my wife’s face as she tried a root beer float for the first time at the Naha City A&W.  Let’s just say that she wasn’t impressed.
Anyway, expect lots of photos this week.  Enjoy.

technorati [...]

Hanging Lanterns

Hanging Lanterns
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Hanging Lanterns at Yasaka Shrine in Kyoto.

Enlightenment

Enlightenment
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
A small waterfall at the bottom of Fushimi-Inari shrine in Kyoto.

Prayer Candles

Prayer Candles
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Prayer candles lit at Fushimi-Inari shrine in Kyoto.

Kitties

Kitties
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Ceramic kitties looking in the window of a shop on a small road in Kyoto.

Calligraphy

Calligraphy
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
One of the temple monks writing the temple’s name and the date in Japanese calligraphy in Mom’s temple book at Kiyomizu-dera.

I (Heart) Huckabees

I (Heart) Huckabees is a really bizarre movie. In a good way. I think.
It bills itself as an "existential comedy" and it is that. That story centers around a young man (Jason Schwartzman), who has been working to save the environment from developers, looking to resolve an existential crisis. He turns [...]

Post

Post
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Ok. Last one of these, I promise.
(We're going to be out of the house all day today and I just wanted / needed a quick post.)
Here's the last of the polaroid transfers I still have from my university days. The original slide was one that I hadn't liked very much – [...]

Slot Canyon

Slot Canyon
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Another polaroid transfer from the box in the closet. I blogged the photo that this was made from a few weeks ago (Flickr image here) so you can see how the end result is quite different from the photo while still being recognizable as the original image.
In other news, I [...]

Petals

Petals
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Something else I dug up while going through the box…
One of my favorite classes during university was one called "Experimental Photography 101". It started as a blow-off class, one that my lab partners and I took to get an easy credit and help our GPAs, and it ended up being one [...]

Veronica Mars

Another TV show that I was horribly late to the game on.  But what a great show.  Good characters, good stories, a bit of humor, a lot of drama, good music.  Makes me wish I was a teenager again, but only in a nostalgia way, not a real way, 'cause, like God, that would suck.
Anway.  [...]

Pig

Pig
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
I hate dieting. Excercising I'm ok with. Swimmming, biking, walking a lot. Cool. Dieting, though, just pisses me off. I absolutely loathe it. But I'll keep trying. I have to.

In the Caves

In the Caves
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
It wasn't really my intention to turn this week into Toad's Resume week but that seems to be the case. Sorry about that.
This particular photo is from a trip to Kamakura that M and I took a few years ago.  We went to a small shrine built into the [...]

Pools

Pools
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

By way of contrast to yesterday’s post, this is one of my favorite shots from my post-uni portfolio. There are no tricks in this shot, I just happened to be standing there at the right time.
The trouble is, I’m not sure where I took it! [...]

Jetting

Jetting
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

Here’s a shot from my post-university portfolio. I’m not sure how much I like it anymore. It looks to empty now.
When I was in uni. I really liked empty photos. No people, lots of space, lots of sky, etc. Since [...]

Jennica

Jennica
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

Here’s another older slide that I got scanned this weekend. My little dog Jennica, back in 1996.
She’s quite a bit older now and starting to run into old dog problems. Decreased senses of smell, sight, and hearing, etc.
But I love this picture of her [...]

Way Back When

Northern Arizona Slot Canyon
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Several of my commitments today were either cancelled or re-scheduled and I unexpectedly found myself with a few hours at home.
So, I fired up the scanner and spent some time scanning and archiving some of my old slides from my university days.
This is one of the my favorites, not [...]

Valentine’s Day

Charlie and Snoopy.jpg
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
So, I told M that I neither wanted (lie) nor needed (true) chocolate for Valentine’s Day. So she got me a Charlie Brown and Snoopy figure.
This, right here, kids, is why I married her.

I Come From the Land of Ice and Snow

Ice and Snow.jpg
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Here’s a quick look at where we went hiking yesterday. I took this picture with my cell phone’s camera, which explains the quality.
I took my 35mm Pentax with me but the shutter froze so I don’t know if any of those shots will turn out. We’ll find out [...]

Nagasaki Number 3

Nagasaki Number 3
Originally uploaded by SunToad.
Trying again. This time I’m posting the photo from Flickr. We’ll see if this looks better than the last one.

Test Post, of Sorts

I’m testing the photo uploading and posting functions with this post, so feel free to ignore it. On the other hand, for the curious, I’m finding that Word Press has more photo functions than Blogger, but getting the photos into a format that WP is happy with is more troublesome than it was with [...]

SpyCam

He got the last pizza.
I could tell from the way he kept staring at the screen in the train. Every time the announcer said how many minutes we had left until we got to Ueno, he damn near drooled. Even then, I thought, maybe I was just being paranoid. Then, when I saw [...]

The Weight

I was listening to The Band perform “The Weight” while I took this. I don’t know that they really match, but in my head, they go together nicely.