"In praise of shadows" is actually a famous essay on Japanese architecture and aesthetics by Tanizaki Junichiro, which I very much intend to read one day. It also has some bad-assed kanji in it : 陰影礼賛. I just stole the title for this entry because, well, shadows definitely come into it.

It's another (mostly) HDR entry, actually. I was reading a local Nagoya newsletter which has information on upcoming events, and it mentioned a firewalking event (not as in what you pay Tony Robbins thousands of dollars for, but as in a local temple where adherents whip up a fire and then walk across it barefoot). It's not actually dangerous as far as I know; they walk not on the fire but on the ashes of the doused fire. It's more a symbolic thing. Dangerous or not, I wasn't going to miss it, and with the D3S I figured I'd get some pretty neat shots. 

I went to the place early just to have a look at it and get a feel for the kind of focal lengths I'd need. Until yesterday I only had one lens for the D3S, namely the excellent 105 F2 DC, which I may well be keeping. However, looking at the setup for the firewalking, I figured that a) although 105mm might be OK, I could benefit from some zoom, and b) a slightly shorter focal length could also come in handy. Some lens shopping seemed in order.

Before any of that happened though, I went from the temple holding the firewalking to Astuta Shrine (Nagoya's most famous and one of Japan's most noted shrines) which is practically next door. I didn't have any particular plans, but it was a bright and sunny day. On days like this, Atsuta shrine has pockets of deep shadow punctuated by bright sun, which is another way of saying "more dynamic range than even the best cameras can handle". Extreme light and extreme dark in a picture is usually a recipe for an underexposed or overexposed shot. So I figured I'd give HDR a try.

First shot: straight up through the trees. No way would a single shot get this right.

Next up: Dark tree trunk with sunlight on a section, with light coloured leaves.

Still a few of the autumnal colours left:

Taking pictures of pigeons is clichéd, but a cliché is OK now and then. This is another plus point of the D3S: the burst mode is so fast that you can get off a three-shot bracketed burst in no time at all, meaning that there's less time for the bird to move or fly off and ruin your shot (HDR is basically close to impossible when it comes to shots with excessive movement, for reasons that are too boring to go into)

Pigeon surveillance:

There was a wedding photo shoot going on at the temple, with a fairly large group. I thought it would be somewhat impolite to shoot it directly (although they were holding it in a public place, it still doesn't feel right), so I went over to the side and saw this tree, which struck me as a possible framing device

More autumn-winter foliage:

When I said that HDR doesn't work with moving subjects, this is the perfect example. I saw this shrine girl walking on the path, and I shot a three burst sequence. When I opened them up in Photomatix, though, it was obvious that it hadn't worked; there were motion blurs around her feet and head. So I just took the correctly exposed shot from the sequence and ran it through camera RAW. Still came out nicely.

Whereas I got lucky with this next one. The light on her red skirt was fantastic, and again I shot three in a bracketed burst. When I looked at the rear screen of the camera, I noticed that she'd moved her head to the left while I was shooting, so I figured I'd have to do the same thing as I did with the above shot. However, it seems that the movement of her head was slight enough to be correctable by Photomatix, and the result was pretty nice:

Another "straight up" shot

Walking path

Nice colours

More nice colours

This guard looked somewhat bored. 

I like the shadow patterns on the ground here

I wanted to try doing two things at once here: an HDR shot, manually focused wide open to get the lens' famous bokeh.

Red fence

A couple more foliage shots to finish

So, what happened to the firewalking? That will be the next entry, in a day or two. Putting them together would make this too long. But there should be some nice stuff there, so watch this space.

Thanks for looking!