Look for this block of shops

To get there, take line 3 orange line to 충무로 station and get out at exit 5. Continue straight towards Myeongdong and one you pass a big tower called Kukdong Building, turn right and immediately turn left on the next small junction. About ten meters later on your right will be a small camera shop called Yeongsang 영상 Camera. Go up to the second floor and there is a black and white photo developing shop. In a small corner of the shop, the old man there will CLA your mechanical camera.

This is what the first floor looks like. Follow the sign to the black & white shop upstairs.

Mine took only 2 hours. About the time it takes to develop a roll of film and cost a reasonable 100,000₩. The finder all clear now an all mechanical parts humming along, it’s cheap and at the same time fast. I was initially expecting a week before pickup. Who knew I could browse the camera shops around the area and pick it up on the same day.

Taking apart the M2

Highly recommended shop. Thanks to rangefinderforum.com for the initial directions. Shop opens 10am to 7pm. However the owner is sometimes downstairs in a used camera shop.

If you have followed this site quite a bit, you would have noticed that this is one of my favourite sites to shoot Mount Fuji. I could wake up early in the morning and walk 30 mins to the other side of Kawaguchiko across the bridge and set up my tripod before 6am. And in the last 3 times I have been here, Mount Fuji would always be visible in the morning along with a calm lake to catch some reflection. Kawaguchiko is large enough not to be perfectly calm, and the wind does kick in about 7-7:30am. So get there early. I will not detail too much how to get there, the easiest would be via the Keio Express bus line from Shinjuku just opposite Yodobashi Camera. And as a primer, Fuji 5 Lakes regions composes of… of course, 5 lakes. From the right to the left, there’s Yamakako, which I have never been, and since I have not heard too much about the view there, I have no plans to visit since it is also out of the way. Kawaguchiko is arguably the easiest one to access, as it is just situated by Fujikawaguchiko and the northern shore is littered with attractions like a monkey show and a music box museum. The views here are one of the best accessible without long hikes and a car, and Mount Fuji looks symmetrical from here. The only possible issue is that the town would be visible in your picture of the famous mountain. Only an issue if you’re after the mountain sans civilization. Just next to it would be Saiko, where Mount Fuji is not visible at all, obscured by a close by hill. News has it that Saiko is a good fishing place. Next to it, a little drive a way is Shojiko, which I think rivals Kawaguchiko. Cars could drive to the lake bank facing Mount Fuji, and you could get down to water level. What you would see on the opposite bank on the foot of the mountain is just pure nature. However, Shojiko is not that easy to reach without your own car. The public buses don’t run regularly, so you may have 1 hour there and if you do not get on the returning bus, the wait may be quite long. No buses at night the last time I checked, so night time shooting by bus would be impossible. One could camp by the lake side though. The last one is Motosuko, a relatively large lake, with an elevated vantage point at the far side of the lake. It is even more remote than Shojiko. This is also the view of Mount Fuji that could be found at the back of a 100 yen note.

Lets see what we have here…

Shoji-ko: This is one of the first shot of this Autumn season for me. The EXIF reads 5:30pm and it was already dark. Exposure reads 30 secs at f5.6 on a 28-70mm. It was already dark when I got there, and the long exposure lights up the mountain a bit. I kept the foreground dark to convey the evening mood. You could see car lights on the right at the bottom of the mountain, and some faint lights at what could be the mountain 5th station. AT this time of the year, the snow cap is starting to grow, but obviously it is still early.

Shoji-ko: This is one of my favourite picture of the shoot. Exposure reads 4 minutes 30 seconds and f8. I did another one that was 20mins long but came up to almost a blank shot. I had a ND8 on the lens and I would have to stretched it to 1hour exposure if I was to get something like this. What I wanted to do with this shot was to have a long enough exposure to catch the star trail. You could also faintly notice a line of a passing aircraft. I would have wished to have more time here, I guess I will explore the possibility to camp here the next time. Would have been great to catch an hour long star trail.

Kawaguchiko: This was taken at very close to 6am. Note the vapour on the lake surface. This morning was not what I hoped for, with cloudy skies in the morning. When I got to the lakeside at 5:30am the mountain was covered in clouds, but almost always it clears at close to 6am when the faint trace of sunshine appears. You also notice that Fujikawaguchiko town is quite prominent in the foreground. This is a 4 sec exposure at f8, at about 40mm, and I cropped the top and bottom of the original frame. You also noticed that the view from Kawaguchiko is a little different, with the long gentle sloping sides of the mountain visible from here, while at Shojiko, the slope is quite strong.

Kawaguchiko: Looking at the east at the rising sun. The only good thing about a cloudy day is that the morning red sun glow is quite strong.

Kawaguchiko: With the sun starting to appear in the morning, Mount Fuji starts to glow a little shade of red. This scene only lasts not more than 10 mins. In fact I think it might have been shorter than that. So this is where an ergonomic camera comes in, when you switch from one scene and light type to another. The controls has to be easily found and you do not have the luxury of diving into the menus to change something.

Kawaguchiko: Looking towards the west, at the thin layer of fog on the surface of the lake early in the morning. We are at 6:20am now.

Kawaguchiko: Here’s a 1 minute exposure intended to give the lake a smooth appearance and to blur out the clouds. It has this mysterious look although it was not one of my favourite shots. Lacks drama. EXIF says 60 sec at f8 and so far all these were shot at ISO200.

Kawaguchiko: This is one of the opportunistic shot for the morning. A fisherman was just passing by in front of me and I waited for him to reach the middle in nice alignment with the mountain peak before I took the photo. Note the altocumulus clouds, as the lower level clouds start to be blown away.

Kawaguchiko: And with a little graduated ND filtering, here is a shot that starts to look different from the rest. This one is 6:48am. There is now enough light to do 1/30sec at f8. I’ve switched to a 17-35mm wide angle set at 22mm for this shot. All on tripods and remote trigger.

Saiko: One of the reason to come here at this time is to catch the Autumn leaves in Fuji 5 Lakes region. At the lower altitudes most of the trees are still between green and yellow while it has already started on the top of hills.

Saiko: Ok I lied a little bit. It is possible to catch Mount Fuji on the western end of Saiko, but only at an oblique angle like this. Since Saiko lies on the shadow side of a hill, it gets the sun later in the morning, and the fog on the surface of the water is still visible at 7:50am. The lake surface is relatively calm here, with reflection of the mountains quite well defined. The blue tint on the water surface was courtesy of a Singh-Ray Gold-n-Blue polarizer. The non filtered photo looks quite bland since I’m shooting more or less into the sun. EXIF reads 1/90s at f8 and I’m back to the 28-70mm.

Saiko: Morning fishing at the lake. This close crop isolates the scene from the messy mountains in the distance which would distract from the subject, in this case the boats. This was shot with a telephoto, one of my favourite lens, 70-180mm Micro. It looks sharper than this on the original file, almost pixel level sharpness. I just love the way the surface level fog stays on this lake surface longer than the other 4 lakes.

Saiko: On the same side as I am standing on, a fly fisherman prowls the banks.

Motosuko: This is the only one that I liked from the banks of Motosuko. This is 8:30am and the sun is already quite high up in the sky. It looks like it over the mountain as at Motosuko you are looking from the west. The vantage point at the carpark is elevated, and I don’t think the lakeside view will be better because part of the right slopes of Mount Fuji is obscured by a hill. This view is very difficult to digest for me, mainly due to the lack of ability to capture a clean Mount Fuji like at Kawaguchiko. However, I met some Large format photographers at Motosuko, so there is obviously some with different opinions than me. The cloud day and the fact that most morning you would be shooting into the sun, makes Motosuko a better evening spot.

Shojiko: back at Shojiko, I noticed this opportunity to shoot a reflected bank at the western end of the lake. Mount Fuji would be on the right in this case. This was shot at a humble 35mm. ISO had to be cranked up to 560 due to the fact that most of the foreground is actually in the shadows. I had to use Lightroom to bring it out while keeping the skies controlled.

Shojiko: The rest of the lake looks quite normal. Nothing special in this view.

Shojiko: One of the boats you could rent for fishing. I’m not sure if a fishing permit would be required to rent it, but for fishing that’s for sure. For this shot I had to add +2/3 stops to the exposure as as the boat is relatively in the shadows compared to the background. But the resulting image was better than I expected when I first shot it.

Shojiko: This marks the second trip where I get ducks swimming past me. The first time I fumbled to switch my camera to the right setting to get the ducks and the mountain sharp and the right shutter speed. I ended with a blurred out ducks… motion ducks. This time I dialed in 1/250s and f11 right away and also managed to set the camera to continuous shot. I have about 10 shots of various duck positions, but I tend to like this one that is a little past the mountain in the middle. I also like the way the sun is partly obscured by the cloud and it is possible to see the god rays above the mountain. Focal length for this shot is 17mm on FX sensor. I’ve heard of people complaining about the Nikkor 17-35mm, but it is a fine lens for me.

Shojiko: Picnic by the lakeside. One day….

Fujikawaguchiko: Enough mountains… the other reason to come here is for the red leaves. There is an entire tourist attraction the week I was here based around a flea market and the sights of red leaves like these. This was shot just next to the road on the northern banks of Kawaguchiko, with many tourists passing behind me. 70-180mm Micro does its second purpose as a micro lens.

Fujikawaguchiko: More red leaves. This is at 1/180s f5.6, the only reason for the large aperture is that I was hand holding the lens set at 90mm and I really wanted something sharp. ISO is 450. For close up shots like this I would go for shutter speeds that are reciprocal of double the focal length (i.e. 1/180s)

Fujikawaguchiko: Trying something different here.

Fujikawaguchiko: I have no idea what this chair is doing here, but it is one of those test shots that made me go “hmm, not too bad looking” after importing it into LIghtroom. So it stays.

And one last shot to close this post. What a better way than to shoot a Japanese Maple leave, Japanese style with uncluttered background and lighter earthy toned overall picture. Over and out, till the next season at Kawaguchiko.

*end*

Sun setting over Lantau Island

Now that was a quick 7 months and a bit in Hong Kong. Whenever I go over Stone Cutter island bridge, I can never help staring at the hill with colonial houses on it overlooking Hong Kong Island. For me at least, that would be the best location with a view of  Hong Kong Island. I’ve always wanted to go there in the evening and set up my tripod to take a panorama at location (22.31530, 114.14248). On my last weekend there, I found that that place is a Naval base, hence off limits to casual passerbys. Its amazing what a little check on Googlemaps and streetview can tell you. So its time to search for an alternative. I’ve shot quite a number of pictures of Hong Kong, and I have not had a good panorama of the place yet, so this is an obvious last project before leaving.

The new ICC tower in Kowloon, next to the waterfront

Finally settled on West Kowloon Waterfront as the second best alternative just above Western Harbour tunnel. Again, best time for me to shoot was between 6:30pm to about 8:00pm. At this time of the year, the sun will start to set at 7pm and there will be two light show. One when the orange glow of the setting sun showers the subject with soft warm light and the second (which I think I like better) when the sun has set below the horizon and the skies in the background are in a dark shade of blue and foreground lighted by orange neon lights. I’m pretty happy with the resulting panorama made up of up to 15 frames of 12 megapix pictures stitched in Photoshop. Heres a sample:

Hong Kong Island at sunset: glowing in the evening sunlight

Hong Kong Island at early night: Moon on the left, remains of daylight on the right.

Good way to end my short stay in Hong Kong. Now signing off, soon I will report back in a new location.

Inside Hong Kong MTR Train

Started off my new project weekend, to photograph the station names of every single MTR station in Hong Kong. I don’t know how long it will take to do them all, but 3 or 4 weekends may be just enough. The idea is simple, take a camera, one lens and stop at every single station and then move on to the next.

There has not been any over eager security guard asking me to stop photographing so far, and to keep things interesting, I’ve got 2 months of backlogged podcasts to keep me company while continuing the task. The only thing I learnt is that there is a limit to the time you can spend in the metro, once you pass the gates. Its about 2.5 hours. And I spent a little more than that, and the Customer Service office let me out without a penalty. Otherwise it would cost a little more than 20HKD. I believe it was 21HKD that they mentioned.

Chai Wan MTR Station

There’s no deadline to this project. It will be completed when its completed, and I will figure out then what to do with all the database of photos! Today I managed to shoot 512 NEF files!

So, in anticipation of a long trip to South America at the end of 2010, I decided to pick up a D3 to familiarize myself with its high ISO performance. My thoughts at that time was that a D3 for main body and D300 for that extra DX reach would be ideal for a long expedition. And just before I was going to ask my usual dealer for one, the D3s was released, and just as well.

Long story short, I now have a D3s. And in summary: while I’m not new to photography, nor digital photography, this camera does induce a bit of an extra learning curve.

First test as I shoot my first 1000 pictures: ISO performance. I don’t intend for this to be a review, hence I don’t plan to include sample pictures. The early feedback from the internet forums is that this camera performs about 1-1.3EV better in ISO compared to the previous high-ISO champion, the D3. As I do mostly landscape with this camera, I intend to test it only for that purpose.

I did 3 tests today, first was a landscape shot with camera focused at infinity in bright daylight, a second scene with an close-up object (confession: a pretty wartime Leica IIIc) with proper illumination, and third was a city scene from the top of a tower.

Results:

What I can say is that this camera’s ISO performance is amazing.

- ISO200-ISO1600: I will not hesitate to shoot with the D3s up to ISO 1600. I could not see any noise or loss of details on the NEF file all the way up to that level in Adobe Lightroom. For once, auto-ISO is an option in the field. (Of course, one should always shoot at base ISO if you can, with a tripod, but still, 1600 is something I will not shy away from. It is THAT good!)

- above ISO 1600 – ISO 6400: From ISO higher than 1600 onwards, I see some noise appearing in the shadow areas, but the well illuminated areas are fine. This goes on all the way up to ISO6400 easily. The noise is very much film-like chroma noise, which is bearable. Not noise-free, but not too much of a concern as details in the scene are all still there.

- up to ISO 12800:  The details held up all the way up to ISO 12800. I love this camera! At 12800 the noise is still very much chroma like with some tinge of colour noise creeping in.

- above ISO12800 – ISO102400 (HI 3): the detail performance starts to drop at ISO +1 to +3 EV, basically ISO 25k up to 102k. Basically the image gets smudgy and bands appear at the highest ISO. But if the difference is between taking a picture and no picture, I’d take the 102k ISO shot anytime over lost opportunity.

Next up: Movie mode at 720p. This is something I’ve used, but the camera seems to be adjusting most of the functions automatically. I will need to test it out to find out how it works.