TOJI MARKET

Every month on the 21st a huge market is held in the grounds of Toji Temple. Vendors set up their stalls starting at 6am. I've never been there that early, but one of my friends sells artwork there sometimes. There are food stalls and all kinds of crafts, antiques, junk, and vintage kimonos.




I've bought several kimonos there. I also bought my favorite bowl for just two hundred yen (It often appears in the photographs on my food blog.) My other Toji Market purchases include a head-scarf, dried fruit, fresh ginger root, and a pot plant.

The absolute strangest thing I saw there was a snake in a jar of alcohol. The alcohol is meant for drinking, not just to preserve the snake specimen. Someone told me it's an Okinawan thing. I wanted to take a photo, but the vendor wasn't happy about it.

MY JAPANESE APARTMENT: A BATH ON MY BALCONY

My apartment is pretty old by Japanese standards (but not by New Zealand standards). Changes in Japanese lifestyle show clearly in the design. For example my shower and bath are on the balcony! This is because when my apartment was built, there was NO bathroom! Until about two years ago there was a sento (a bath house) at the bottom of the hill, where people could go to soak in a large communal bath. I often saw elderly people wandering along the street with their buckets full of bathing equipment. It seemed very strange and inconvenient to me, but on reflection I can see that from  economic, ecological and community standpoints, the sento was a much better idea than every house and apartment having their own private bathroom. Sadly the beautiful old sento was demolished and now generic suburban houses stand on the site. The area has lost both character and a piece of history.

The mini-bath

Getting back to my balcony bathroom, although it was added on like an after-thought, it's not as bad as it sounds. In fact, it's not so much on the balcony, as a small room off the balcony. It has an excellent shower and a very small bath. Although I can't stretch out in the bath, it uses less water and it's deep, up to my neck if I fill it right up. Maybe I even prefer it to the larger baths I was used to in New Zealand. In Japan most people still take baths daily, in the evening. I like this custom - a bath is a good way to warm up, and relax after a busy day.

Sometimes in winter it seems intolerable that I must go out of my nice warm apartment in order to enter my freezing cold bathroom, but the hot water always warms me up again. In warm weather I can sit in the mini bath with the door open (privacy isn't a problem) and listen to birds singing in my neighbor's garden. I always leave the door open after using the bathroom, so mould is never problem, although I do have to check before entering in summer, because centipedes, spiders, beetles and even lizards seem to find it an attractive place.

EVEN MORE FUN WITH PHOTOS: MAKING STUFF

This post is about making stuff with photos. There are lots of cool websites on the net where you can do fun stuff with your photos - for free. This list is just a sampler of what's available.

You can turn a photo into a personalized eCard at Picnik, adding text, speech balloons, stickers and special effects. Some of the choices are only available to paid members, but there are still lots of free options as well. One of my favorite Picnik effects is the zoom focus.




There are also lots of free frames,
text options and special effects at Tuxpi

Surprise someone by putting their face (or your own) on a magazine cover or a billboard at Photo505...










I also use my photos to create impressionist style digital paintings. I use software called Dynamic Auto Painter. It's easy, fast and fun to do. The resulting paintings really look as if they were painted with brushes. There are a number of different styles to choose from, and various ways you can adjust the end result. I've even sold a few of my paintings as posters and cards on Zazzle. My best seller digital painting is from a photo of a Harley motorbike.




And that brings me to another fun thing you can do with photos... you can put them on physical objects like mousepads, t-shirts, and mugs. I haven't tried this particular option yet, but I will... once I make up my mind which photos to use (that's one problem with having over 12,000 images!) Zazzle has a huge range of products to customize with your own images, and you can also sell products designed by you on the website. ArtsCow also has a wide range of products including a few not covered by Zazzle such as umbrellas, blankets and watches. Both Zazzle and ArtsCow have cards, posters and canvas prints, as do Red Bubble and Imagekind.

And if you had a photo or piece of digital artwork that you really really liked, you could even turn it into a wall mural at Murals Your Way.

Have fun!

PLUM BLOSSOM IN GION

Although we haven't had as much snow as Europe and North America this winter has been the coldest I remember since I came to Japan. But February should see the end of it and by next month the weather will begin to warm up. I was going through some photos of Gion that I took last March. Gion is the old area of Kyoto where geishas lived, and where the story of Sayuri was mostly set. Even today, if you walk around Gion  in the evening, you might catch a glimpse of a beautifully clad maiko or geisha heading to an evening engagement.

My photos were taken in the afternoon. There were no geishas, but there were beautiful pink and white plum blossoms - the first messengers of spring.

Send free eCards with pictures of Japan
Search Amazon.com for books about kyoto
          

MORE FUN WITH PHOTOS: SHARING

If you take photos you probably want to share them. Luckily people love to look at pictures. There are lots and lots of places on the internet to share photos. I use several of them...

My oldest photo sharing venue is my  photo blog on Aminus3, where I've been putting one new photo every day for the last 1,450+ days. Aminus3 has members from all over the world. It's a virtual world tour to look at  other member's photos! I love to get comments from other members, because it tells me someone has seen and enjoyed my photo. Most comments are positive. I don't think it's a good place to get constructive criticism, but there's plenty of opportunity to compare my photos with other photographers who are better than me. I am often inspired and challenged when I see other people's work. Joining Aminus3 is free.

I also use Flickr. Lots of people use Flickr! You can see reports (stats) of how many people have viewed your photos. I'm often surprised how many people have been checking out my shots. It's a great place to check out other photographers' work too. Flickr also has lots of other useful features such as themed groups, tagging and convenient sharing to blogs and email. I often submit appropriate photos to the various groups I belong to, and most of the comments I get come through those groups. Flickr is also a good way to back up your photos. I have over 12,000 images on Flickr. If anything ever happened to my computer, I could still retrieve my images from my Flickr account. Basic Flickr is free, but because I have so many images I pay for a Pro account at US$24.95 per year. I believe Picasa Web Albums offers a similar service.

I've probably had most fun sharing photos on Facebook, through photo albums, and more recently through PhotoVoo. The idea with PhotoVoo is you submit photos to a themed gallery or challenge, and other people can "Love" them. Photos with the most "Loves" win competitions. People can also comment on photos, and I've made several friends via conversations that started out as comments.

I also enjoy using my own photos to illustrate my blogs. Whether it's a magazine or a blog, good images grab attention and keep it longer.

FUN WITH PHOTOS: EDITING

Increased saturation and contrast

Photography is a big part of my life. Maybe it's my addiction! I have over 12,000 photos on Flickr (not all them are good - but I use it as a backup, in case anything ever happened to my computer.) I started to get interested in photography years ago when I worked in one hour photo labs in New Zealand. My job was to print photos, check them, and fix them if they were too dark or light, or a strange color. Perhaps because of that, I have always been interested in editing photos.

I love how digital cameras and computers have made editing easier for ordinary, non-technical people. For years and years I took all my photos on my camera's automatic settings, because I wasn't much interested in cameras... it was the picture I was interested in... the view, or the face, or the moment. Although I have learned a bit more about how my camera works over the last couple of years (enough to know I should buy a better one) I still spend more time editing photos and doing other stuff with them, than I spend taking them. And while you can't make a bad photo into a good one, many photos can be improved with a little editing.

Increased saturation & color correction

Sometimes people ask me what I use for editing. I use several different programs and none of them are Photoshop. I do have an old-ish copy of Photoshop, but it's all in Japanese, most of which I can't read. To start with I use Picasa to adjust light and dark contrast, sometimes increase the saturation (I like rich color), and occasionally crop my images. I also use Picasa to remove any small marks. (It's quite good for getting rid of wrinkles!)

Wrinkles & dark circles under eyes removed

Picasa is also very convenient for cropping images, but if the image needs straightening, I do it in Paint.net because if you use the straightening feature in Picasa the image loses some of its sharpness.

Straightened

Both Picasa and Paint.net are free to download.