Nikko + technical camera ramblings

Nikko was fun! And it was indeed freezing cold. It was nice to see mountains for a change. There was snow on the ground and it started to rain a bit on the day we left, but other than it being really cold, the weather was nice while we were there.

Nikko is about 2-2.5 hours north of Tokyo by regular train. It's in the prefecture called Tochigi. There are lots of natural hot springs in the area; our hotel was actually located in a place called "Kinugawa onsen", named such for the onsen (hot spring) from which many shops and hotels pump water from. Our hotel had public baths that used the onsen water. Not as cool as the one in our ryokan at Hakone, which was outside and actually looked natural (and not nearly as hot), but it was still neat.

We also got to eat Onsen Manju, which are steamed buns filled with sweet bean paste sold in onsen towns. We were trying to figure out what made these particular buns onsen manju, and we concluded that they're steamed with onsen water, but researching online I guess that's not true. They're just manju sold in onsen towns, and sometimes they have the onsen mark on them. Considering I don't like sweet bean paste (because it looks like chocolate, and I want it to be chocolate, and it definitely isn't chocolate), they were pretty good.

We got there kind of late on Sunday so we just went to our hotel. We went down to the "club" on the first floor and ended up doing karaoke with some Chinese guests and the owner of the hotel! A weird coincidence was that he was also the owner of the hostels we stayed at in Asakusa at the end of Winter Break! Some of the other staff joined in later on and they were all really nice and it was a lot of fun.

On Monday we did all the sightseeing. We got a combination pass to all the major temples/shrines in Nikko for only 1000 yen. We saw Tosho-gu, the temple complex where Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun, is entombed. It's famous for not only that but being unusually lavishly decorated. It also has the original famous "No evils" monkeys carving on one of the buildings. I thought it was interesting because first of all, I didn't think the original carving would be in Japan (maybe China), and secondly, it wasn't just a single wood statue - it's kind of a relief carving and only one of a series of carvings of monkeys on the building.

We think we saw Ieyasu's tomb... Apparently it's not a very noticable area of the complex, and there were so many decked-out buildings it was kind of hard to tell what anything was... Plus there weren't any conspicuous signs, so... Well, Tosho-gu was impressive nonetheless.

We also visited Rinno-ji, the temple complex situated around the Tosho-gu mausoleum. Again, it was kind of hard to tell where one thing ended and the next began other than when we had to hand over a part of our combination ticket. We saw the famous "3-Buddha Hall", though no photos were allowed and the 3 Buddhas were behind a huge wooden grid. It was kind of hard to see. (And as a side note, there's actually only one Buddha there; the two on either side are images of Kannon, who is a Bodhisattva. For once I'm actually learning/applying things from a class! Japanese Art History is pretty interesting.)

One of the buildings here had a famous painting of a dragon on its ceiling. As a monk there demonstrated, if you stand directly below the dragon's head and clap two wooden blocks together, the sound reverberates in a certain way and apparently sounds like a dragon roaring.

Finally, we walked through Futarasan Shrine, where Tokugawa Iemitsu (the 3rd shogun) is entombed. Also cool, also gaudy. By that time we kind of had to hurry though, because all those places closed at 3:30 which is unusually early, plus we were freezing from being outside so long (and taking our shoes off and various buildings that required it! That was not cool).

Oh yeah - before we set out to see all these things, we happened upon a small Chinese New Year festival at Nikko station. There we saw people in oni costumes. That was when we figured that the area has two oni as its mascots. Kinugawa-onsen has Kinu-chan, and another neighboring area called Kawaji-onsen has Kawa-chan. I think it's funny that Japan uses something like a cute demon as a mascot for something. Though throughout Japanese folklore there are lots and lots of monsters and demons, which are so commonly known that they're not all necessarily considered scary, which is why they can be used in popular culture like that.

*****

My photos of Nikko aren't that great :( Mike said his turned out awesome (I haven't seen them yet) but I guess I wasn't really trying that hard this time. Maybe because it was so cold. Yeah, I have photos that show what the temples looked like, but nothing I'd hang on a wall. Though I haven't edited any yet, and that will make a big difference. I took these photos all in RAW format rather than JPEG, so they naturally don't look as good with no editing.

Uhh, I guess I'll explain. Aside from the better quality parts and lenses, Digital SLR cameras are so good because of the option to take photos in RAW format. This is sometimes known as a "digital negative". It's a completely unaltered image, though it's a much larger file size, which is a pain to work with because even my computer lags a lot when working with RAW files. All point-and-shoot cameras give you JPEG files by default. This is a lower-quality file, but the camera does some editing (such as increasing color saturation and adjusting contrast levels) for you. This is good for consumers because it makes the image look better on the surface, and basically makes an image that is ready to go in your personal photo album right away.

RAW files look kind of ugly at first glance because there's none of that minor cosmetic editing. However, the image is much sharper. You can choose to shoot in JPEG or RAW format with a DSLR, and I've been using JPEG for the most part because of the smaller file size (and until a couple weeks ago I didn't have the software to even open RAW files in Photoshop). But last summer I took some photos in RAW that have just been sitting on my computer, and even looking at them at 25% their original size, unedited, I could see the difference in quality, so I decided I should shoot in RAW from now on...

But yeah... I guess after I try editing some photos maybe they'll look better, but right now I'm not really impressed. Also, I need to learn to hold the camera straight, plus my lens needs to be cleaned badly. Another reason they pictures are bad (and I know this for sure) is because my autofocus has been screwy lately. My camera just didn't seem to want to autofocus on anything, so I had to manual focus a lot (which I have trouble doing unless it's macro). TODAY I finally get the bright idea to look up online what could be wrong after a couple months of this problem, and of course it was just a matter of I'd accidentally changed an autofocus setting -_-;; Works perfectly now, but because of this, a lot of the Nikko pictures aren't focused well.

Since I'm talking about cameras, here's a tip for anyone planning on buying a digital camera: don't waste your money on anything over 6 megapixels, especially if you're not buying a DSLR. My Nikon D50 is 6 megapixels. They make point-and-shoot cameras that do at least 10. It's completely unnecessary, and because it's just going to be 10 megapixels of JPEG anyway, it's totally wasted.

6 megapixels is equivalent to 35mm film. If your 35mm film camera was a high enough resolution for your 4x6 prints, 6 megapixels will be too. 35mm film at 400 ISO can be blown up to about 11x17 without looking too grainy. Unless you're going to make posters or billboards, you don't need to pay for any more megapixels than that. And as I said before, unless you're outputting RAW files, your pictures are still going to look kind of fuzzy if you make them that big anyway.

Plus, if you take photos at higher resolutions than that, your memory card is going to fill up really fast, and your computer might lag just trying to open those huge files.

So! 3 megapixels might be a good starting point if you're just using the camera for 4x6 prints of everyday snapshots, but don't go higher than 6 if you're not planning on opening a portrait studio.


And now, the world's tiniest snowman:


Which (sigh) isn't actually in focus either.