Ruheplatz

There's a small restaurant upstairs that remains for us to try out, which friends have told me is very good, but it did seem a little expensive. And that, you could say, is my neighbourhood, of Kogane-Hara. A place you won't see in travel magazines or tourist brochures, but with it's own charm nonetheless!

THE END.

Breads, in French

A painting on the wall outside. As my neighbour told me, whilst there aren't that many varied communities in Japan, which is still quite an isolated place, there are lots of cultures. Notice how lovingly the types of bread and their names in French were painted- I wouldn't be surprised if the owners have trained there.

As a matter of fact, the word for bread in Japan is from the French, 'pain', and instead of a bakery, they say 'bread shop', which is a translation of the French 'boulangerie', or hot bread shop. There are also a lot of 'patisseries' around, usually filled with house-wives and old ladies sipping a coffee and nattering about things. As for the men- they're usually at work- yes, even the supposedly 'retired' ones!

Cakes

Let's not forget the eclairs and doughnuts, while we're at it. Each of these is made to perfection, although they aren't always my cup of tea. Like many eclairs in Japan, these aren't made with whipped cream, rather a kind of custardy stuff. The doughnuts are also different than I'm used to. Instead of jam ('jelly', in the US), they have a sweet red-bean paste called 'anko',which is very popular here but also very sweet. I'm more a fan of their selection of danishes.

Breads

They also have fantastic brown and seed-rich breads, which are a far cry from the fluffy-white-cotton-wool stuff that predominates here, which I frankly can't stand! Here are real crusts and rich tastes. I sometimes buy a lot of brerad here and keep it in the freezer to have for breakfast each day.

Cup-cakes

It has a rich selection of breads and cakes, in the European style, which are certainly the best I've had in Japan. Here are some cup-cakes with prunes and pumpkin seeds.

Popularity

... It's very popular. Although this is just a regular, suburban street, you can often see a line of people waiting to get into what is a very small bakery. There is somethign slightly surreal about the sight.

The Bakery

Here's a fantastic local bakery, which we only recently discovered. As you can see...

Local Day in the Life- Backstreet Zopf

Some people reading this may see that the basic title is about 'A Day in my Life'- so I decided it was for me to post some more photos of my local area, where I spend a lot of my time. These were all taken with our new Fujifilm F30. It's an exciting new compact camera and you can see more photos taken with it here. Quite a lot of people have been looking at those photos just to see if the camera is as good as everyone says it is!

Note: 19/09/2006- The first draft of this piece (on July 18th) involved some snaps of everyday things here, which I was happy to look at just because of the pleasant associations... but then, looking again, I realised that they were 'watering down' what is becoming more and more a photography-based blog. There is a difference between a photo and a snap, just as (I would argue) there's a difference between treating photography as an art and as a craft.

So, I decided to do a bit of tidying up and edit the set down to just a presentation on this wonderful bakery. Being from England, I love good bread, but in Japan it is kind of hard to get. So I was really pleased to find a place in the area that has bread that doesn't just fill me up, but is amazingly delicious.

Some examples of the Tokyo HDR photos. Note the rich colours, bringing out the neon. Seen this way, I really feel the atmosphere and emotion of the city. Despite all the tall buildings and buisiness neccessities of running one of the biggest economies in the world, people just want to live. Everywhere you see the search for a more attractive lifestyle, the envy of a glamourous existance.

THE END.

True HDR... HDR Redux

-I-


-II-


-III-


I recently refined my HDR process to include a few steps in Photoshop, which should hopefully make the colours more tasteful and bring up the contrast, which seems to suffer a lot from the tone-mapping process. So I call the expanded technique 'HDR Redux'.

Needing to make a few trips into Tokyo for camera repairs anyway, I decided to try my hand at some 'true' HDR images, each one made from three photos with different exposures, which I then went on to treat in Photoshop. You can see more of at Tokyo HDR. So, here we go...


Note on HDR Technique: 19/09/2006- In fact, I should come clean- up until now I haven't posted any true HDR images here. The photos I posted earlier are more accurately referred to as 'tone-mapped' photos, as they were made only from one RAW image. In case you don't know, a RAW image comes straight from the camera's sensor, whereas a Jpeg is processed to make it look both smaller and to look good. Of course, one RAW image, being 12-bit, possesses far more information than a conventional 8-bit Jpeg photo, so it is 'relatively' HDR, but it's a contentious issue to call it that.

'True' HDR is pushing back the boundaries of what is possible with digital photography, and dealing with it's nemesis- it's relative lack of dynamic range and sublety of colour, by blending images together to produce 32-bit images, images that can't even be displayed by conventional monitors. Tone-mapping came about as a process for making such images look pleasing to the eye on the screen (though, as I learned, is not always enough on it's own), yet can also be used to bring out the hidden depths of a 12-bit RAW image.

Also, anyone who has read these pages before may notice that there were a lot of the aforementioned 'semi-HDR' tone-mapped images here, that have since been removed. They can still be seen at Tone-Mapping Experiments.