When I see the word “botanical,” my first thought is gin. Okay, but… A visit to Kyoto’s very beautiful botanical garden reminded me that the word has other uses as well. I spent a long, delightful morning wandering through this magnificent park. Enough said: The photos speak for themselves.
Hoi An was treated to a fiery, magnificent sunset last night. The brilliant colors of this sunset may just be serendipity for those of us who got to watch, or they may be a warning announcing the arrival of tropical storm Trami, which is somewhere in the East Sea heading for central Vietnam. Generally speaking, I am not particularly interested in weather and am not fluent in weather folklore, so I cannot say one way or the other. The exception to my general rule of being uninterested in weather is when big weather events are headed my way. And with top wind speeds well over 100 kph and a deluge of rain on offer, Trami qualifies as a big weather event. Being in the path of such a storm gets me interested, in this case, interested enough to download the Windy app so I can track Trami’s movements. From the looks of things, the center of the storm with its destructive high winds and rain will make landfall quite a distance north of Hoi An on Saturday 26 October. Here we are almost certain to get bucket loads of rain over several days – after all this is the rainy season in central Vietnam – but with some good luck we will avoid Trami’s howling winds and the damage they cause. Or maybe we won’t. One report in a Vietnamese publication suggests the storm will turn south after making landfall. At that point it would be headed towards Da Nang and Hoi An. Just have to wait and see. In anticipation, I did a lot of food shopping yesterday.
As some of you know, I just returned from a couple of weeks in Japan. I have loads of photos from the trip, and had planned to get started processing and posting yesterday, my first full day back in Vietnam. That plan was derailed by a ten hour power outage, during which time a crew of a dozen or more guys in orange suits worked on the big power box at the end of my street. Said power box has been acting up for a couple of months now with several outages of short durations, and hopefully the extensive refit it got yesterday has put recent problems to rest. I can at least hope the repairs give me a better chance of having power during the storm. Whatever, I will get started with the Japan photos in the next day or so.
Got back from a family visit to the US a couple of days ago. A taking-care-of-business trip with almost no time for photography, but this Mother’s Day image is a keeper.
There is a fish market that gets going in the pre-dawn every morning in Kê Gà village. I presume the boats in this photo are back from a night of fishing in waters near the coast. As far as I know, Vietnam does not have any of the huge factory-type fishing boats that put to sea from Japan and a number of other countries, but there are some larger Vietnamese boats that operate in deep water for days at a time. Smaller boats like these and the ones I see in Hoi An stay closer to home.
I moved the camera at the same time I pushed the button that opens the shutter allowing the sensor to capture the image. On the one hand, I think looking at the picture makes it rather obvious that I moved the camera, whether intentionally or otherwise. On the other hand, to the viewer, I don’t think it matters all that much what I did with the camera. Either you like what you see, or you don’t, or you look and give the pic a mental shoulder shrug. Whatever, in this age of way too much information whether you want or need it or not, moving the camera has its own name – intentional camera movement. Who knew? And what would a name be without an acronym – ICM – compelling curious non-photographers (and some photographers like me) to fire up a search engine to sate their curiosity, and in the process, collect yet another virtually useless piece of information. There is a Wikipedia entry for ICM as well. Just to dot the final i.
Happy New Year from Hoi An! May we all have a happy, healthy, peaceful Year of the Dragon. Apricot bushes with their beautiful yellow blossoms are in flower at this time every year. Hoa mai – apricot flowers – are a reminder that Tết has arrived.
I love how the sensor of my Fujifilm X-T30 renders light and color. This late afternoon shot of a ramshackle home that backs into a small tributary of Thu Bon River is a good example. I made slight adjustments to exposure and contrast, but that was it for post-processing. My Nikon D750 would also produce an appealing rendition of the light and color in this scene, but it would be qualitatively different than the X-T30 image presented here. I must start taking both cameras on my photo trips in the days to come, so I can take some comparison shots.
I bought the X-T30 a couple of years ago, and recently have been trying once again to figure out the user-unfriendly, erratic software interface that comes with the camera. Although it is a beautiful piece of equipment, it has proven frustratingly difficult to use this little mirrorless camera, and it has spent a good deal of the time I have owned it sitting in a closet.