bird up đ“…Ą
busted out the nd filter today for some cool long exposure stuff. and walked around the nearby nakajima park. also, the above photo of the heron is some of my best work ever. gotta brag about it.
song!
i have no idea what i’m doing
now that i have the new camera filter, i know in theory what i can do with it. but i’ve never used one before, so i don’t really know exactly how much to adjust the various camera settings to compensate for the filter. so it was a lot of trial and error.
this picture where the cars look all ghostly was only achievable because of this filter. it allowed me to get a shutter speed of 60 seconds despite it being full daylight. super cool. it also took 12 attempts to get a photo that wasn’t just a solid black or white rectangle. i am figuring it out.
one of the things these filters are most known for doing is landscape shots involving water. the long exposure time can make water in a shot look super smooth and ethereal. thankfully, there is a park with a giant pond in it right outside my airbnb. the perfect place to practice with it.
now, you might be wondering - “all that yapping about this filter and time spent going to get it and you have seven images total to show off?”
well, first off, yes. but second, these pictures all took so many takes to get right. these 7 images are probably 2 hours or so of just trial and error with the camera on the tripod this morning. i have no idea what i’m doing, but i got a few really cool pictures out of it.
duck yeah
when i wasn’t getting these filter shots, i was taking photos of the cool birds in this park. there are some really beautiful ducks here. i used a bird nerd website called ebird.org to identify all the birds i saw today. these orange ducks are called mandarin ducks.
the male ducks have the bright orange feathers with the cool whiskers and “sails” on their backs. the female mandarin ducks are less fantastical, as you can see. i don’t think i’ve ever seen a bird this cool looking before.
i also learned that despite the name, these ducks are primarily found in japan. they do exist in other parts of asia, but not nearly as commonly as japan.
no egrets
while i was walking around this park, i saw an egret walking around slowly in the water, catching food.
this is (i think) an eastern great egret, a subspecies of the great egret, which is also known as a “great white heron”. absolutely beautiful bird. and the shots of it flying are some of the best photos i have ever taken. i’ve mentioned before that something my camera equipment setup is particularly poorly equipped for is aerial bird photography. thankfully, this guy both took off and landed
sparrows and crows
i am pretty sure the little guy is a eurasian tree sparrow, and the crows are large-billed crows.
this park is neat. at one point, there was a group of 5 people (me included) with cameras just following a small group of the mandarin ducks around. they clearly didn’t want people near them, because every time our little group got too close, they would run away on foot and the whole process would repeat. it was fun just being in a little bird paparazzi group with some old folks for a while there.
eating adventurously
my airbnb host told me about a sushi restaurant close by, and said he could make a reservation for me. so i had him make the reservation. the sushi chef spoke zero english whatsoever. and the way the restaurant works, you just pay 8,800 yen ($55) and he (and probably the morning fish market) decides what you will be eating. so i had no idea what like 75% of this meal was. some of it was good. most of it was… unique. it was not at all bad, but stuff tastes different when you have no idea what you are eating.
i dont know what the vast majority of this was besides like… “fish”. one of the above images is some variety of crab, at least i think it is. it came with a crab fork. no idea what it was. it was good.
but i want to call attention to the last image there. the one on the left is roe, fish eggs. it was good. the one next to it is uni. sea urchin. i knew uni was sea urchin. i’ve never had it before, so i ate it happily. it was not great. it wasn’t horrible either, but i definitely wouldn’t order it again.
but during the process of writing it, i learned that uni isn’t just sea urchin. its sea urchin gonads. so thats fun. i went to the fun entertainment district full of sex workers and ate fish balls.
headed home
not much to talk about here, i walked home from the restaurant and got a few more photos on the way.
