I have a show of my photos opening this Saturday. The show is called "101" and features photos of various kinds of everyday objects, including robots. It's based on my "thing of the day" project, which some of you may remember. The show is at Halo Salon, 1919 3rd ave, Seattle, and the opening is this Saturday at 7:00 pm. Please come one and all. Not only would I like to see you and appreciate the support, but I'm very happy with the way the photos have turned out and I think you will very much enjoy the assorted robots, vegetables, tools, utensils, miscellaneous doodads, and other Things.

I have been slowly working on a complete overhaul of my photo pages and it is finally done. Here it is. Okay, not done; there's always another improvement to make, but done enough to make it public. My goals were: first, to emphasize the photos much more by making the design as minimal as possible; and second, to switch over to a proper mysql/php back end instead of the perl/html hodgepodge that was becoming a maintenance nightmare. I'm pretty pleased on both accounts, though of course I still have a long to-do list. Your praise feedback is welcome.

This incidentally has been taking up some of the time I'd be spending finishing up my Cambodia and Vietnam photos. There are other problems there (working with raw images for one), and I have other photo tasks going (preparing for a show that's coming up soon), but having the nice new site ready is a decent impetus for finishing up the rest of the trip pictures.

At last, I've gone through my photos from our first stay in Hanoi (still to come: Angkor (the big one), Hoi An, and our last few days back in Hanoi). The pictures include: temples, people, street scenes, and even a study of the fascinating walls of Hanoi.

I admit it, I like stuff. I especially like really well-designed stuff. And I especially like really well-designed stuff that eschews modern over-complexity in favored simple, tried, and true interfaces. Knobby analog synths, utilitarian racing cars, and manuals cameras. But at the same time, I like to be very logical. I like stuff, but it's just stuff. I'll take the more suitable tool over the mystical fetish object every time. And so this extensive new yorker article about leica cameras was both sort of pleasing and annoying. I love the leica and would own one if I had the spare $$$ to toss around; but at the same time, I kind of sneer at all the mysticism around them (or for that matter, that whole "lomography" thing). Yes, it's a great tool. But it's not magic. It's not going to make you (or me) into cartier-bresson. But damn I want one.

Some photo stuff from this year I'd let languish without uploading:
snow (january)
spring buds at my house (march)
spring at kubota gardens (march)
things I've been cooking (more to come)
black grill scrapings in a white sink (may)
seattle aquarium and market (may)

Since my last round of photos from Kubota wasn't very satisfying, I went back the following week with my other camera (better for closeups) and took a whole lot more (or here are just the new ones). Much better this time, with the sorts of closeups I like and not so many blurry ones. I really hammered on that ginkgo tree; revelation: I think the ginkgo is my favorite tree ever, even better than all those Japanese red maples. I was also there during a sunny interlude on a wet day, so though the color was great, I also got some good water droplet photos.

Going and taking photos in Kubota Gardens when the leaves change is becoming an annual tradition for me. Patty Puke and I went last weekend. Unfortunately, it was gray for most of the time. Plus I was using a long telephoto for some nice closeups, but ended up with a lot of blurry shots. So, not my best outing. Anyway here are the photos.

It was such a beautiful day, I couldn't resist going for a drive along the lake. And once I was there, I couldn't resist stopping and taking photos of the flowers.







Yes, I do have some more naturalistic photos. But let's face it, after a while, pink flower after pink flower gets a bit dull. Actually, the first one was just an attempt to render in a photo what I saw with my eyes. Our visual system does a much better job of balancing light and dark inputs than film/ccd does -- and it's especially obvious when trying to take pictures of delicate flowers against the sky. You can simultaneously see the pink of the flower and the blue of the sky, but in the camera you have to choose, or resort to photoshop trickery.

Also, I don't wish to toot my own horn or anything, but I can say with no exaggeration that I am the guy who shot the opening shot of the best movie of 2005. I shoulda asked for more money.

So maybe you've seen tag clouds, like at del.icio.us and other sites. I think they are, like, totally cool. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's basically a way of presenting information that conveys a couple things at once. Typically you see a collection of tags, and the most-used tags are shown in larger fonts, so your eyes are first drawn to the most important things, but everything else is there.

It's easier to show than explain, which takes me to the point of this post, which is to show off something I put on perkowitz.net. Check out my new photo page. The cloud shows the most-used keywords among my many photos -- click on one to see the matching photos. The larger the tag, the more photos there are (hover to see an exact count). I added a little twist to my cloud too. I have too many tags to show them all in a manageable way, but instead of just showing the most common ones, which would get boring, there's an ever-changing fringe of lesser tags (try it! reload!).

One more feature, which I've really been having fun with, is that if you click on a tag, which essentially does a keyword search, you get a cloud with the resulting search. This cloud (try clicking on "japan") shows all the tags that occur on all the photos resulting from the search, and if you click on one, it narrows your search! awesome. Computers r cool.

When I was about 12, I went to Europe for the first time, with my parents. We visited Paris and London (and environs) mostly. I know somewhere in my shoebox from that trip I have a picture that looks just like this:



except that it's of the real Eiffel Tower, not the fake one at Paris, Las Vegas. I mention it because that trip is the first time I remember consciously taking "artistic" photos. Specifically, I remember this one, and a similar-perspective one at the Tower of London, looking up at an arch and tower. I remember thinking as I took them how cool the pictures would look (some things never change, do they?). Walking under the fake Eiffel Tower reminded me of those first efforts and I had to repeat the shot.

Last week, J and I took a long weekend in Vegas, kind of a late birthday getaway for me. We spent Friday and Sunday in the city wandering around, eating, gambling, and taking pictures. But the highlight was definitely Saturday, when we rented a BMW Z4 convertible and went to Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, and the Valley of Fire. All the roads were hilly, curvy, and nearly empty of people. The Z4 was great -- it was smooth, fast, and always felt planted on the road, no matter what I did. It was probably the most fun driving I've ever done (J can't quite say the same, since the curvy roads made her feel dizzy at one point; but overall she enjoyed it and thinks I should buy one). The scenery was amazing as well, particularly the Valley of Fire, which looks like the surface of Mars. It's all a pretty easy drive from Vegas and highly recommended; even more so if you feel like splurging on a great driving experience.

Our time in Vegas was pretty fun too. We stayed at Bellagio, which was very nice. Though to be honest, I think we both preferred wandering around Paris -- it's not as luxurious but has more character, and things there are actually affordable (even if you get a good deal on the room as we did, everything else at Bellagio will soak you). Bellagio, like many of the casinos, has this weird character where there's a meticulously designed theme to all the decor outside and in, except that the theme just leaves off when you enter the casino area. At Bellagio, everything is marble and fountains and expensive names (and ugly Chihuly pieces), except the casino, which is the same smoky, noisy, low-ceilinged, tacky-carpeted place as everywhere else. It's weird -- if it were my casino, I'd make it look like something out of a James Bond movie. Anyway, Paris nicely carries the (admittedly somewhat cheesy) Paris theme throughout, and the casino is actually kind of a nice space, airy and high-ceilinged, with a fake sky and fake Paris Metro stops all over. And little cafes. We did have fun going from casino to casino and critiqueing their decor and coming up with our own cheesy casino designs (two for me: one called Shogun made to look like a giant Himeji castle, with of course waitresses in slutty geisha outfits and weird Japanese anime slot machines and the other called Robot Robot where the waitresses look like the sexy robot from Metropolis and all the bellboys do the robot before taking your bags). Maybe the highly of Vegas glitter though was Fremont Street, aka old-school Vegas, with its many many lights, topless bars, seedy casinos, and $2 blackjack tables.

Anyway, all the pictures are here, but here are a few teasers.

Inspired by a monochrome woodcut my Mother gave me, I've been working on some monochrome woodcut-style images. Maybe part of an eventual ukiyo-e style series "37 views of modern Japan" (with robots!) or something.

On our last full day in Japan, Sami and I met up with Raymond and Koto (from the Mifune Productions outing) for lunch with Raymond's brothers-in-law and some of their friends, all of whom work at the Tsukiji fish market. They usually work from about 2am until 11am, and afterwards they get together at this little restaurant to eat sushi and drink for a few hours. Pictures. Unbelievable amounts of fish and shochu were consumed. Some of the guys had known each other since they were kids, and the dynamic among them was remarkably like between our gang; in fact, after watching a couple of guys affectionately dissing each other (in Japanese of course), I had to teach them the phrase "talk shit". This lunch and the sushi we'd had on Monday morning after our visit to the market were some of the best sushi I've ever had, no question. I also got some more pictures as we walked around the neighborhood, and that night at dinner.

On Thursday, I made a day trip on my own to Kamakura -- the others had either already been or didn't feel like going. I'd heard about the giant Buddha and interesting temples from them and from my parents (who went in 2003 after I flew home) and was also planning on tracking down Akira Kurosawa's grave.

Unfortunately, it was a gray, drizzly day. Though it didn't rain too much, it was sort of depressing and not very good for photos. Anyway, I started off by walking up to the Hachiman Shrine, a large, much-visited shrine pretty much in the middle of the city. It's perched dramatically on a hill, with a great view of Kamakura. What really caught my eye though was a bunch of flags on a little island by the side of the main path.

Next I wandered around a bit, bought some ceramics, and eventually stumbled into a more out-of-the-way temple with a beautiful cemetary. Where I also petted a cat.

After that I went looking for the obscure little temple that holds Kurosawa's grave. I had a few wrong turns and mistakes (amazing how many cemetaries you can stumble across in parts of Kamakura), but I eventually found it. I asked a temple worker where the grave was (actually, I said "Kurosawa Akira?" and she said some stuff in Japanese, and then drew me a map and wrote out the Kanji so I could find it). I eventually found it (or hope so) and left an offering.

Finally, I hopped a bus and went and saw the big Buddha who, it turns out, is really big.

Only one more set of photos to go!

Swag photos. Compared to previous visits, this one trip was less about pottery and more about cute toys. It would seem.

Here.




Favorites after the cut..

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Never mind what I said about putting all our photos from the trip on Flickr. Flickr has a pretty tight upload limit if you're not paying, and the UI is lousy for looking at hundreds of photos anyway (apparently, you can either view your pictures by the order they were uploaded, or you can sort them all by hand; how about sorting by the date in the photo metadata, flickr? or alphabetically? I'm not paying for that). So anyway, I have a few on Flickr, but most of the rest will be on perkowitz.net and linked here, as usual. I guess the other guys' stuff will be on Flickr or here, here, or here.