Folsom street fair: devouring hot, stiff meat

The Folsom Street Fair is one of San Francisco's signature events. It's an annual Leather and BDSM street fair, and draws a large crowd both from the subculture and from spectators.

So, at an event like this, packed with public S&M activities, public nudity and more than a few counts of serious public lewdness (I kept a “wanker counter” running during our visit), who am I to turn down the offer to wrap my lips around a hot, stiff, tasty hunk of meat?



Really, it was the least I could do to try and melt in.

Nanzen-ji Sanmon

This entrance gate to the Nanzen-ji temple in Kyoto looks to me a lot like the gate in the Kurosawa movie Rashomon, under which the characters are hiding from the rain.

Skeletal bird

Susanne has an encounter with a skeletal bird, wielding an impressive array of feathers.

Arima Onsen — Golden spring colorations

Arima, just outside Kobe, is an entire city dedicated to the industry of bathing in their hot springs. It's one of the Three Classical Onsen sites, going back to the 7th century, and is famous for the two springs: 金泉 (kin-sen, golden spring) and 銀泉 (gin-sen, silver spring).

The silver spring has slightly radioactive water, and alas we chose not to expose ourselves to this. The golden spring has water very rich in iron salts. Rich enough, in fact, that the water is a deep orange, and opaque enough that you can only see a few centimeters deep in it. Rich enough, even, that the entire city is coloured a kind of reddish orange from deposits from the hot water — cooled down to a mere scalding 42º before you'd bathe in it.

This photo was taken just outside a shrine with a water container dedicated to the hot spring; a shrine where everything was caked with salt and brightly orange with iron, all over.

Geisha shrine on Shinbashi-dori

More HDR from Yasaka

I really love the results from our late night tripod photo shoot on the temple grounds of the Yasaka temple in Kyoto.



I will move on to other subjects. Any week now, I promise!

Yasaka Shrine HDR — surreal

Using the “surreal” settings from the HDR engine in Photoshop CS5, and tweaking the settings, you can arrive at a completely different entity altogether. I rather like this result; and it's starkly different from yesterday's version!

Yasaka shrine HDR

A photorealistic HDR take on the entrance to the Yasaka shrine in the middle of the night. Stay tuned for other results from the same source files!

Yakata Shrine entrance by night

Starting out with a triple of images, taken to produce an HDR image of the Yakata Shrine entrance (coming up soon!), we noticed that the +2ev picture had great potential.

Played around a little in Photoshop, and — voila!

Kanteibyo

The famous chinese temple Kanteibyo in Kobe.

Inari's torii walk, Minatogawa

Another one of these temple walks leading up to the shrine of the kitsune god Inari, clutching the keys to the granary in his maw. This one in the large Minatogawa temple in central Kobe.

The Minatogawa shrine

The Minatogawa shrine is possibly the largest of the Shinto temples in Kobe. Gorgeous, as are they all.