azimuth

By the miracle of seasonal shifts in the sun path, my north facing window actually gets some direct light! I am very grateful.

Last of Qi Lan.

to let go

I really had the intention of lining up a week worth of songs from A Rush of Blood to the Head, but then I got too deep into the rabbit hole of optimizing JR rail passes Monday night.

Oh, big news. I am finally gonna stop making excuses and haul myself to Kyoto. 99% go.

I also had the intention to write a post today summarizing lessons learned from my first business trip (Memphis). The significance is more so on packing light, but it really wasn't a challenge for a 2 day trip. Will write about this over the weekend.

For now, this song is helping immensely with not feeling miserable after much sleep deprivation. Actually I didn't lose that much sleep over the trip, really tired regardless.



I like the song more before I watched the MV, she could have chosen a much better outfit.

...

It's times like this that I really appreciate having a corner of the internet to complain about random stuff.

oh lie to me

Listening to some new-ish Coldplay to celebrate finding out about their new album. I'm not a big fan of the new song, but it'll probably grow on me.



Though I've actually mostly been listening to the much older A Rush of Blood to My Head, but saving those to fill up next week.

flange thickness

It's nice to be out in the field for a couple of days.

Excited to be traveling for work next week too. I really wish they'd send me to enough places to rack up some good mileage, but that would requires a couple more years of experience.

shino

I received my new tea cup today.

The day MUJI first opened it's Toronto store, I got a little celadon-esque cup there and loved it. I still love that cup, but I love this cup. I fear that all my affection has gone to this new cup. In fact I just sent pretty much a love letter gushing with praise to the potter, with hopes that he will make a shiboridashi with this glaze. Then my heart will really stop.

Let's start off with my favourite photo:

Used my lowest aperture (f2.2) and is very happy with the depth of field and softness. I did cheat a little and blurred the background in PS (this tutorial helped tremendously, how did I not know about the quick select brush?). Otherwise the only editing I did was a little sharpening to bring out the crackles, but the color and exposure was spot-on from camera (jpeg! not even raw!). It was the standard that I tried to match every subsequent photo to...without much success.

What I love so much about this cup is that there's so much visual interest in the glaze itself. There's pinholes AND crackles, and there's shiny sections and matte sections.

The clay itself is plenty interesting to look at, and is a lovely contrast from the shino glaze. 

Some assam for the first sip. Can't wait to drink some pu-er from this over the weekend. The rim is quite thick, and so very comfortable to drink from.

It's taking a lot of self control (and credit limit) to stop myself from buying the yuzamashi with the same glaze.

vibrance and saturation

Part two of what I spent my Sunday afternoon editing, featuring my first foray into LAB color (which I learned about the Sunday before) and the previously mentioned cheesy gochujang pasta.

So I was shooting both raw + jpeg, editing off raw, and noticed a big difference in the color rendition between the unprocessed raw file and the jpg with velvia emulation. This led to some quick googling on how to emulate the emulation, which resulted in this:

The process is pretty much switch to LAB colors, which is a color mode that separates the luminance (how light or dark) from the color (in 2 channels, a and b). It's really easy to make major color adjustments from with levels or curves on the a and b channel. In this case, I just pushed the levels of both a and b towards the center to increase the saturation. The only other adjustment I made was a selective color to town down the cyan in the highlights.

Compared to a totally separate (as in not trying to achieve the same effect) jpeg edit:

The jpeg edit has more realistic colors, but I like how the green and blue tones are brought out in the raw edit. The raw edit also has more details in the shadows which I pulled from ACR.

Comparing camera jpeg, jpeg edit, and raw edit:

Unfortunately I forgot to include a comparison of the unprocessed raw.

Even though I like the end result of the raw edit better, it took at least twice as long as editing straight from jpeg since the flexibility compels me to tweak every little thing. For photos that I get good exposure, I'll stick with just editing from jpeg. As below:

garnet

Good day spent drinking tea and practicing taking photos of said tea.

This image is my goal.
The color rendition, lighting, focus, everything is so perfect. I wonder if this was a one or two people job, I suppose it could be done by one person with a tripod and remote shutter.

Now I'm a little embarrassed to post my own photos haha.
Regardless, today's drink is Joseph Wesley's Keemun Congfu. I was a little confused since the tea is from FuJian whereas Keemun referes to QiMen in AnHui according to wiki. The tea didn't make much of an impression, aside from it's longevity. I got 12+ brews from around 5g in my yixing (~100ml?). The first two brews had a distinct sour and...iuno leathery (but not the smell) taste.

Manual focus practice, would be nice if my camera had focus peaking since it's difficult to tell on the back screen whether something is actually sharp. This was shot in raw to pull out details out of the shadows since it was a pain to expose properly with the dark leaves and bright aluminum.

My poor attempt at a pouring shot, one decent image out of 5 out of focus ones. Again manual focus first and then trying my best to hold the camera steady with one hand while pouring with the other hand. Wishing for a tripod...
Did some extra post-processing on the area of the lid where water is splashed on to increase the contrast. My trick is to set a b/w gradient map on hard light.

I recently switched my film emulation to velvia and am really liking it's color rendition. Works especially well for the tea liquor. Also started to use curves when editing from jpegs to help tone down the over and under exposed areas.

PS. teachat is dangerous for the wallet, ended up buying a teacup. It is gorgeous *u*