Winter 2012 - Photography Trip

This winter has been very fruitful for my photography. After so many years staying here, I finally rented a car in winter and driven around on icy roads, with occasional snowstorm and white-out (with Ankit, an Indian friend who is on his way picking up photography, and Hannes, a German friend who called for the trip). 

Visibility in snowstorm  

Almost white-out

Entering tunnel

Exiting tunnel

In windy condition, if the road is level with an open field,
there will be continues sheets of snow hurtling across the road

At night, when snowing, driving with high light is impossible.
I put on the high light for few sec just for the sake of photography.
As I am driving, so Ankit took the shot. 

For the trip, the final destination is Sounkyo, a small town  at the middle-north of Hokkaido with average temperature 5C colder than Sapporo. 
The first stop was at a hot-spring resorts area (Shirogane town) for taking pictures of this waterfall. The waterfall remained unfrozen because it's a hot spring waterfall. 

You can see the steam rising from the water

Next, we went to a natural hot spring at middle of a mountain. It's really in the wilderness! The surrounding temperature was -5C while the water was 46C... a very extreme hot-spring experience.   

When we left the hot spring, it's already dark. From Shirogane to Sounkyo took us about three hours on icy road. 
Sounkyo is located in mountainous area with many elevated cliffs. When in autumn, the cliffs turn colorful and this is why Sounkyo is listed as one of the popular red-leaves viewing spot of Hokkaido. 

The white-vertical area at the left is frozen waterfall

Taken from Mt. Kurodake. When doing time lapse, the battery  of my timer control  went dead  because of the cold temperature - first time experiencing this.

I have also visited a ski resort for the very first time not doing any snowboarding, but just photography. 

The panorama photo was taken from Mt. East of Rusutsu ski resort. I chosen this resort because of the Mt. Yotei view.

My Canon 16-35 mm lens safe my day.
Without the 16 mm wide angle,
I will not achieve a shot with this perspective
 which gives emphasis on the snow accumulated on the trunk,
and it will make a less impact then.  

The following shots seem like the desert, but with snow instead of sand?
Maybe I have not travel to other places and therefore I have yet find other places with this kind of scenery except on top of the ski mountain.  

Elephant never forget!

Elephant never forget!
And that is why it was chosen for the icon of a note-taking software, the  Evernote.
I think I am safe to say that elephants do forget eventually, just that they have a much superior memory as compared to other animals. Anyway, before I gone too far into animal facts, lets get back to the main subject of this post.

I begin to use Evernote few weeks ago for note taking (mostly for information from the internet), saving website addresses (in place of bookmarking which only accessible through the computer you bookmarked them - very frustrating sometime), and making to-do list. One very convenient feature about Evernote is that it provide you with an account. Once logged in, you can synchronize your notes created from different computers (in my case, between the one at home and at the office). So you can access your notes, whenever and wherever, for as long as you have access to the internet. Hmm how can we live without the internet if more and more things like this get into our life?

When I started it, my initial plan wasn't actually to get a note taking software. I was figuring how to make a To-Do check list along with the Google Calender (GC). As you know (if you are a GC user) the GC only reminds us about the upcoming events. So, how about the things needed to be done? Depends on your mum? or your wife? Of cause they are often kind enough to keep 'reminding' you about the things you needed to do, by telling you when to eat, when to take both, etc... but... you know what I mean. We are talking about the To-Do list, not those to-do list (although I must agree that they are important too, in fact, the most vital things to do in life)... okay, lets get back to the main track of the post.

As I am looking for a way to create a To-Do list along side the GC, I found that GC has a feature which allows us to add gadget in it. One of the gadget is the Evernote gadget. (to learn how http://www.vikitech.com/563/easily-add-evernote-gadget-to-your-gmail-and-google-calendar)   
Once I added the Evernote in my GC, now I can keep track of my to-do list which I created in the Evernote program. Their combination is a perfect solution for people like me who has bad memory!
Now, as long as I can access the internet, and provided that I didn't forget my Evernote log in identity, I'll have the superb memory just like elephant :)


       

Persimmon (柿子)

I still remember that when I was little, I once asked my mum "why you never bought the new-year fruit?" after I saw persimmon in our neighbor's house. Back then I don't know the name of the fruit and so I called it new-year fruit because it is available when near the Chinese New Year. My mum said it is too expensive when compared to other common fruits like apple or orange. So it worth more to have two apples or oranges than only one persimmon for the same price.
Perhaps my mum has planted in me the thought that I should go for persimmon when the price is comparable to  other fruits. Of cause, we should never overlook the influence parents could have on their children. Even for some small matter which we don't think it may bother anyone, but it could still have the potential to shape the way the children perceive the world, even in their later life.

In Japan, the season of persimmon is around the end of autumn. And that is when the Jusco near the dormitory we are staying starts to sell the fruit in a large quantity with very affordable price. 99 yen each to be precise. The conversion rate to RM of cause will make it seems expensive. But when considering the salary of Japanese, it is like RM1 each.
Btw, by far I am referring to the smaller specie one shown in the photo. As for the larger one, I've never seen it at Jusco. It's a souvenir my wife received from her colleague who recently went outstation and bought it at the place of the business trip. According to her colleague, the fruit isn't available else where. So this is a very rare opportunity to taste such a big persimmon.
As you may see, it is about the size of a big apple. But what really make it so irresistible to me are the sweet taste and the crunchy bite. By 'and' I really mean it like in a math's definition - the two conditions 'sweet' and 'crunchy' must be present for the 'irresistible' to be true. We can easily find a sweet persimmon even among the the smaller specie one, but the bite never feel like the apple-liked crunch. It is only with the big persimmon that I learnt that the fruit can be crunchy as well. And to me, the crunchy feeling is way better than the Apple's one because the hardness is just nice.

Mushroom & Statue - Mt. Maruyama

Yesterday went to the reserved forest of Mt. Maruyama, Sapporo. The main purpose is to photography one of my favorite photography subject - mushroom. 

The first time I photography mushroom after owning a macro lens was during my trip at Oirase.
To shoot mushroom, tripod is a must because it usually grow in shaded places which required very low shutter speed - mostly shot at 0.8 second in this series, thus handheld is impossible.
Also, I usually overexposed it by +1 or +1.5 so that the mushroom looks growing.
To make it interesting, approach from law angle so that you are showing its under side of the cap, which should looks growing glowing with back-lighting and a little of overexposed. How I wish my camera has a swivel LCD to make the task easier.
I didn't shoot any top-down picture because it looks dull to me.

Since there weren't much mushroom to shoot, I then started to find these (below) statues to be interesting. 

When you started to pay attention, you'll notice that they have very different kinds of expression.
This one looks jolly to me.

This one looks calm and a little serious.

This looks calm and joyful.

 So as this one.

Calm and humble.

A typical cunning, evil, foxy smiling.

This too, calm and joyful.

Calm and innocent.

Calm and joyful.

There are scattering along the way up to the hilltop of Mt. Maruyama. 

Perhaps counting them will make the way up less tiring when you have something to keep you from thinking about how tire you are. But what if you become tire of counting? Because there are literary more than hundred of them!  

 

My bicycle, parked near the entrance to the walkway up the hill.

Swan - Scientific Writing Assistant

Came across a software called SWAN - Scientific Writing Assistant, which was created to help writers with the content of scientific writing. Eventually I downloaded it and tried it out. This is how it work:
1. Go to this website to download a zipped folder http://cs.uef.fi/swan/download.html

2. After the download, extract it and these are the content:

3. For window users, double click the "Launch_SWAN_(Windows).bat" file and a DOS window (below) will pop open which indicates that your window is launching theSWAN

 4. This is how the welcome message looks like during the 1st launch, you can choose to disable it.

 5. There are tree options, I've chosen "Quick start" for my trial. You simply click on the one you preferred for your evaluation and it will bring you to the next step.

 6. Now, open the file where you keep your manuscript. In my case, I opened a Microsoft Word document. Then all you need to do is simply copy and past the content of your manuscript into the respective column in SWAN.
For "Quick start" option, you only needed the "Title", "Abstract", "Introduction", and "Conclusion" sections.

 7. Then click the "Start Evaluation" button.

 A small window will pops out which shows you the evaluation progress.

 8. In the evaluation results, it gives comments on each of the four sections. The Green (+) sign denotes positive comments, whereas the Red (-) sign indicates areas you 'may' want to take a look and reconsider about your text.
It also provide some statistic about the length and the voice of your sentences. It'll warn you when a passive sentence is found.   

It'll also highlights your words with different colours, to indicate the different word categories found in your text, e.g. imprecise words, judgemental words, transition words, and words in the passive sentences.

In general, I am quite happy with the guidelines given - It'll remind you what are the good things to include in your text and what to avoid. However, a software is still a software, it have advised me to include 'future work' in the conclusion section when the last sentence of my conclusion says 'In addition, further work is required..." - It failed to perceive the meaning of the sentence when different word is used to convey the same message.