tokyololas

Pepsi Shiso on my kitchen counter

In the summer of 2007, Pepsi Japan introduced cucumber-flavoured Pepsi that was the start of an annual tradition of introducing novelty flavoured Pepsi (2008 and was “Blue Hawaii”, a pineapple lemon concoction). This summer it’s Shiso.

Most people know shiso best as the green leaf that comes with your sashimi. It is very fragrant and seems to be something people either love or hate. Personally, I like the odd piece of tuna wrapped in a shiso leaf and I absolutely LOVE ume shiso maki (うめしそ巻き), so I’m definitely a shiso fan (I’ve even used it as a substitute for basil in homemade tomato soup - using it as a basil substitute is not that uncommon in Japan as shiso is generally cheaper). It is, of course, also known by it’s scientific name perilla, but that probably doesn’t mean much to most English speakers who are not sushi eaters (i.e., perilla is not commonly found in North America supermarkets).

Apparently (according to everyone’s favourite reference tool, Wikipedia), shiso is thought to have anti-inflammatory properties and is thought to help preserve and sterilize other foods (the latter would definitely explain why people would wrap it around a piece of raw fish in the height of summer).

So, unfortunately, while I have big love for shiso, I don’t really have big love for Pepsi (I hardly ever drink anything other than water, wine, or coffee and, if I do, it is Coca-Cola or Dr. Pepper and never Pepsi). Therefore, the bottle of Pepsi Shiso is still sitting in my refrigerator - I bought it more to take a photo of and think about the marketing than I did to actually consume.

Pepsi started a great summer marketing gimmick with the Cucumber Pepsi back in 2007: it generates a lot of excitement and curiosity and gets people into the carbonated beverage section who might otherwise just pass it by. In general, Pepsi Japan has done quite a few interesting limited edition launches over the years - my favourite was probably the BAPE Pepsi bottle-shaped cans (I had a few lying around for years, but I may have gotten rid of them when I moved, which maybe I shouldn’t have done because I just saw 4 of them for sale for $20 on yahoo auctions…):

BAPE Pepsi bottle-shaped cans

Anyway, I may or may not taste the Pepsi Shiso - I’ll keep you posted (although a number of first reports on the web are not giving favourable reviews, with most saying it tastes like medicine).

Official release poster from the Pepsi Japan website

Today was a bit of a gloomy, typical, rainy season day in Tokyo. With a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to undertake the monumental task of sorting and tagging the close to 30,000 images that are on my back up hard drive (and that is just 2008 and 2009!); of course, during the course of this, I will be drastically reducing that number to, I hope, a third.

Anyway, as I am also making an effort to write more regular blog entries and I happened to be working on January, 2009, I decided to write about my visit to the Imperial War Museum in London in, yes, you guessed it, January.

The reason I put “serendipity” in the title of this entry is because my sister and I had not actually planned to go to the museum. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true: we were planning to go to the museum that day, just not the War Museum. It was probably the third day in a row that we set out to “go to the Tate Modern”. Each of those days we just ended up NOT going to the TM (we did get there eventually); it was not for any particular reason, but just because neither of us is very hung up on sticking rigidly to an itinerary (which is, in itself, a funny statement because it seems to imply that we HAD an itinerary). Needless to say, we travel well together and we both take a pretty relaxed approach to the day.

So, in our attempt to take a less-travelled route to the Tate Modern, we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the Imperial War Museum because we were very nearby. I won’t go into too much detail about the several cups of coffee I’d had beforehand, the lack of public toilets (or ANY toilets for that matter) in London, or how I’ve never been so happy to approach a public building in my life.

I’m sure the War Museum is not that high on a lot of visitor’s lists for London, but, simply put, it should be. I certainly have my biases (I’ve always been interested in history, my grandfather was in the trenches in WWI, and my father served in the Pacific in WWII), but, beyond that, I just think everyone living in the comfort of a war-free zone in 2009 should at least acquaint herself/himself with events that took place in our parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime. These things should never be forgotten and for anyone who does not have access to a first-hand narrative, the War Museum can bring some of it to life and deliver some of those narratives that time might otherwise erase.

For me, it ended up being a very resonant experience. I grew up listening to a lot of stories about WWII. From my mother, I heard about life in the U.K. during the bombings and air raids, and what it was like to go outside in the morning and discover that half a block in your neighbourhood and been blown away; and from my father, I heard stories about life on a ship in the Pacific, arriving in Hong Kong the day after the Japanese had surrendered, etc. In addition, I grew up with, for want of better expression, pseudo-surrogate grandparents who were both Holocaust survivors (an older couple who were very close to my parents when they first emigrated to Canada). At my house, dinner conversation included things like a very heated discussion on whether or not the Americans should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or whether or not ordinary Germans were complicit in the Holocaust (just for the record, the consensus was NO, NO, and ABSOLUTELY).

What I found at the War Museum was, for example, a life-size WWI trench that you can enter and walk through (it’s dark and has sound effects and is somewhat disorienting at first), a whole display on children during WWII and what it was like for them in terms of daily life (diet, air raids, clothing, etc.), and an exhibit on the origins and development of the Secret Intelligence Service (originally the Secret Service Bureau) including a whole range of early spying devices. There is also a fairly extensive Holocaust Exhibition, but we elected to not visit it that particular day because we were both in the U.K. at Christmas as a means of separating ourselves from grief and loss and it did not seem a good idea at the time. I will, however, make a point of going back the next time I am in London.

As is typical for most war museums, there is a fairly large display of the machinery of war (including a couple of airplanes suspended from the ceiling). I imagine that it is this that attracts many visitors to the museum (aircraft or tank buffs coming to look at the machinery in person), but there really is so much more on offer that it is worth it to go for the better part of a day.

Some photos to give you an idea of the place - next time you have a rainy day in London, check it out:

Atrium and aircraft in the main hall of the Imperial War Museum London

Propoganda poster at the Imperial War Museum

WWI trench simulation Imperial War Museum London

Tokyo International Forum interior

Despite the meltdown of the global economy and a general slowing of business everywhere, 2009 has been a busy one for tokyololas so far (which may or may not explain why I have left a photo of a weird looking poodle at the top of this blog FOREVER).

Anyway, the other day, I was having a very brief email exchange about processing black & white digital photos and I was explaining why I really like to use HDR/tonemapping for black and white photos, particularly black and white photos of sky/clouds.

Two caveats up front: I don’t really care whether or not the process is called “HDR” or “Tonemapping”, so I will refer to it as HDR going forward; AND I don’t really care whether or not people like or don’t like “HDR”. I will agree that there is A LOT of very badly done “HDR” floating around the internet, but, beyond that, whether or not one likes the more extreme, cartoonish-looking HDR is a matter of personal preference or if you are not a fan of the Stuck in Customs style, again, that is a matter of personal preference.

I have certainly dabbled in a range of “HDR” styles just to get a feel for the process and see what can/cannot be done; and I have certainly produced a few HDR shots that I now abhor, but I am glad I did do them as a kind of experimentation because I now have a very strong sense of what I like and don’t like. As I said above, it is all a matter of personal taste and even when I find myself not particularly liking someone else’s vision, I do understand the time and effort that went into producing the end result.

These days, I tend to only do HDR for sky shots or architecture, and I MUCH prefer a more “True Tone HDR” style. In other words, I want the HDR element of the processing to be very subtle or even indiscernible. I have also found that a lot of digital black and white photos I see online are quite flat and lack the range of blacks that can be found in a nice black and white film photo.

This observation and dissatisfaction led me to start experimenting with HDR for black and white shooting and processing. I say “shooting” here because I almost always know before I take the shot that I am going for a black and white end product and, of course, if you are going to do decent HDR, you need to decide up front so you can do the multi-exposures (yes, of course, I know it is possible to do HDR from 1 shot, but I never do, so it is always a decision I make at the point of shooting).

This is not really a tutorial, so if you have no idea what any of this means, and, more important, you want to know, you might want to do some additional reading: stuck in customs HDR tutorial, Naturescapes.net HDR Landscapes Tutorial, Wikipedia HDR page, and Photomatix (the software I use to process/tonemap the images).

Personally, I like to keep things simple, so my approach to HDR is simple: no tripod - just a fast lens (I own two tripods, including a very handsome carbon fibre model, but I rarely carry it out and about with me and most often use it on my balcony or out back at night), 3 exposures using the AEB feature of my camera (-2/0/+2), upload to Lightroom, process in Photomatix, final adjustments in Lightroom (usually minor or none), export the final image. The whole thing from selecting AEB to exporting the final image can be done in less than 10 minutes. I know doing more than 3 exposures can yield even better results, but that would then require a tripod 100% of the time and would involve more fiddling with exposures on the spot (fine on a nice summer day, but not something I’d want to spend time doing when it is below zero outside). Two things I have not included above: shoot in RAW (I assume that anyone who owns a half-decent DSLR is shooting RAW - if you’re not, you should be and you’ll need to in order to do HDR), shoot on ISO 100 if possible or 200 if you must (any higher and you’ll most likely end up with noise in your final image).

Now, the results. The first shot below shows the base image (the “correct” exposure of the scene) converted to black and white - pretty flat, no?

Here is the HDR/tonemapped version (click on the image and you’ll get a larger view):

Much better range of light and, what’s incredible, is that you can actually see a patch of what seems to be precipitation under the cloud (which is not at all visible in the base image). Now, if you want to have more fun, you can do other things with the image. For example, here is the actual final image that I ended up posting to Flickr - it was desaturated in Lightroom and there was some adjustment in terms of blue/green tones (again, clicking on the image will give you a better view):

Back to black and white - here are a few other examples of how I use the above process to get a final image I am happy with:

Palais Garnier -Opéra de Paris

Notre Dame de Paris (Notre Dame Cathedral) interior

intense sky over Harumi

I saw this yesterday - I thought I’d share it…for those of you who, like Cartman on South Park, don’t like “gingers”, sorry…

Oh, let’s go crazy and do a blog post two days in a row…

I was on my way to the subway this morning to meet a friend for lunch, and I saw this - a Far Side just begging to be written:

It then reminded me that a few weeks ago I’d seen this - all the traditional Japanese Autumn symbols set up for some portraits at a local dog boutique (jugo-ya full moon, tsukimi dango, pampas grass or could be bush clover - both are traditional Autumn symbols and I can’t tell from the photo but would guess the former):

The former surprised me a lot less than the latter. I suppose it’s because when I first came to Japan, it was not very usual to see a dog that was not a “traditional” Japanese dog (Shiba or Akita, etc.); and the dogs you did see were usually chained up outside the family house on a chain or rope that always seemed just a little bit too short. Now, of course, only several years later, you can barely go for a walk without tripping over a pack of long-haired dachshunds or several chihuahuas and you are then at the other extreme with scenes like this (and, in case you are wondering, there is no baby):

I was just updating another blog I maintain and thought I’d pop over and take a look at my blog. I was a wee bit shocked to realize that I’ve had an iPhone for almost 3 months. Oh well, at least I like it more now than I did before (although it is still lacking a few features I think it needs: “Mark as Read” would be a good starting point) (but, just as I typed that, it occurred to me that the feature might exist but I’ve yet to discover it).

Anyway, it’s been a busy few months and it does leave me pondering, yet again, if I should just scrap this endeavour. A kind commenter in Montreal, Van Hus, seems to think I should (but he also has some perverse desire to defend CNN writers, so I’m not sure we can take him too seriously).

My sister was here for a visit and we did a bit of travel: went to see F1 (hence the photo above, which was taken with the GIANT lens I lugged to the track 3 days running), went to Kyoto, toured around Tokyo. In case you are interested (and don’t worry if you’re not because I am not really an F1 fan either and don’t know much about it beyond the usual), the photo is the winning driver at Fuji Speedway this year, Alonso.

Here’s a classic Kyoto photo - this is Kinkaku-ji (aside from the striking gold facade, it is famous for being burned down by a monk in 1950 and then the act itself was immortalized in Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavillion):

I don’t really take too many classic touristy photos these days - I tend to be more interested in things like this if I go “temple tromping”:

I’m off on another tour of the countryside for a few days on Thursday and I’m hoping the leaves are in full colour (although they seem a bit muted in colour here in Tokyo this year; but, at the same time, they are not fully changed yet). We’ll see…

PS: In case you are wondering what I mean by a “GIANT” lens, this will help you visualize it: