Recent Photos

Some recent pics I've taken around Misawa...

Black & White

Hirosaki Sakura Festival...

Noda Cleanup

I was down in Noda town about a week an a half ago helping clean up tsunami damage. This is all volunteer work, but the Japanese like seeing us out in uniform. Noda is about 2 hours south of where we're at here in Misawa.

Photoshop Tricks

Just learning some simple photoshop tricks. Photoshop is alot of fun, but its easy to get carried away.

The Girls

Took the girls down to Komaki Onsen for a photo shoot. I was extremely unhappy with my lens's ability to focus, but I suppose you can't complain too much about a $90 lens. I still managed to get a couple of good shots.

I Love My Bike

If there's one good thing that came out of the earthquake its that folks had to live a few days without an endless supply of gasoline. I've taken the opportunity to take another crack at serious bicycle commuting. I say serious commuting, but I only live a 12 minute bike ride from work. Regardless, I've managed to use my car about 3 times in the past 3+ weeks. And, I really enjoy it. My new Fuji Cross Comp isn't the fastest or prettiest, but its the perfect bike for zipping to and from work and around town on errands. Plus, it looks good with mud on it.

Photography in Tokyo

I got to spend half a day running around Tokyo this weekend and it worked out very well. I'm not a big fan of large cities, but I love taking pictures of colorful people and big cities offer so much more opportunity. I could easily spend 2-3 days taking pictures just between Shinjuku and Harajuku.

Photography in the Philippines

The Philippines seems like an obvious place to practice some photography. But, its not without its challenges. First, having been there so many times, I sometimes have trouble stepping back and seeing what I once found exotic or interesting about the place. Second, Filipinos love cameras. It can sometimes be extremely difficult to get a candid shot or a picture without a dozen little kids trying to squeeze into the frame.

Christmas in the Philippines

Before its too late, I wanted to get up a few pics from our Philippines Xmas.
We got to go to Marlon's school and see a nice little reenactment of the Nativity.

The Philippines version varies a bit from the one we're familiar with....two of the kings were of middle eastern origin while the third was actually Liberace.

Rose came up with the fabulous idea of dressing me up as Santa Claus.

Rose had put together dozens of plastic gift bags for the village residents and candy for the kids. The bags essentially guaranteed most of them would at least have a Christmas dinner of ramen, eggs, and tuna.

Messing With Photography

Trying to get better with my camera...and Adobe Photoshop;)

Who's Raising Our Children?

Had an important day with the girls today. Its always been said that "a boy needs a father". Well, girls need fathers too. We often leave the raising of ladies to the women. There are important life lessons which mothers too often either cannot provide or simply neglect the need to provide. Today, Angelica and Helen learned about Queen and now appreciate the ritual of cranking the stereo up and screaming Freddie Mercury lyrics out the car window. Who else is going to teach them these things, their mother? I thnk not. This is your job dads.

Festival Time

Well, its festival season in Japan. One thing about Japan is that they're crazy about festivals. Particularly during the summer and fall, you could easily go to a differnent festival every weekend. There are salmon festivals, garlic and beef festivals, blossom festivals, apple festivals, cherry festivals, etc, etc, etc. I've always been one to avoid festivals...not because they're not interesting, but because I've never been a fan of crowds. But, we attended a couple this weekend and and it was pretty fun. The first festival was the annual Misawa city festival. It consisted of alot of folk music/dance performances, food booths, and a couple of parades. The ice cream guy...

A little drum major...

Why does the fat kid always play tuba?

His World of Warcraft username is HannibalTheAnimal128.

The kids' fave...

The next day, we took a trip to Aomori City to check out some shopping malls. We didn't intend to go to any festivals, but ran into this one on accident. There was a set of perfoming groups who appeared to be competing with eachother.

The groups were mostly women and young girls with a few guys mixed in. They were doing an action-packed, martial-arts style of synchronized dancing.

They were all dressed alike and performing when...

Blam!!! They'd flip their outfit and all of a sudden, be in a different colored outfit. As I said, there were several different group performances, and the outfit changing thing was common among them all.

There uniforms also consisted of umbrellas, fans, etc. The dance routine was pretty amazing in itself. But more fascinating was a part of the performance behind the dancers...

Each dancing group had one or two guys in the back with these gigantic flags. They were waving them around along with the music and it just sent chills down your spine to experience it.

To stand there and wave such a huge flag took a ton of strength and balance.....

and a badass hairdo...