Konnichiwa, Nippon!

As you may or may not know, Linda and I embarked on a two week adventure to the island
of Japan last month. We've wanted to go to Japan for as long as I can remember, and there
were many times in the past when we started to plan the trip, but due to one thing or another,
it just wasn't in the cards.  But 2010 was the year we made it happen. Linda painstakingly
planned every hour of every day of the trip so we could maximize our experience, and to my
surprise I think we accomplished over 85% of the things we wanted to do, which I think is
pretty impressive, since most of the time you run into problems on trips like this that
prevent certain things from happening.  One other thing that was nice about this trip, is that
we met up with our close friends (Tom & Kris from Chicago and Jim up from Singapore)
while there which made the experience that much more fun because we could share it with
other gaijin.

So, with out further ado, I will start documenting the trip here on LJ.  But be warned, some of
the following posts will be epic in size, as I just have too many photos to share.  I did my
best to organize things, with a post for each day there, and several separate posts that will
deal with individual aspects of the trip in more detail.

Also, I must apologize ahead of time for the quality of my photos.  Being on the move
constantly really does not bode well for careful photography, and many of the photos
were taken with my little Sony Cybershot, some on the sly, and many in poor lighting
situations.  Anyway...

Here we are, still in the US waiting for our flight...

A quick snake trip...

Went over the hill for a day to see what kind of fall snakes we could find.  We went
to a place that has never let me down.  For the first 4 hours, we got completely
skunked, everything was dry as a bone and there were no herps to be found
anywhere.  At the very last spot, the road of uber snakiness came through and
provided this little beauty.

Fun Fishing Weekend

So we did some serious angling this weekend,  Things started out good along the
Truckee, but we had some rain and then the river got really muddy and basically the
fish stopped biting all together, so yesterday, we hit the carp hole to see what was biting.
The results were good.

I hooked up first with a moderately sized MagiKarp. Sweet.

Messing with HDR again...

This weekend was quite boring and empty, but I did try to mess around with a little more HDR
photography.  The above shot is the best one I got.  I need to find more dynamic situations to take
advantage of what HDR is capable of, so these photos were really just practice so that I can
learn and remember what to do in the future....I want to get the process down pat so I can take
some dramatic shots while in Japan.

We made fish Tacos....

'

Rinda

I had an idea that I thought would be cool....

Sony Cybershot W350 Panoramas

So in preparation for our upcoming trip to Nippon, I purchased a new point and
shoot.  I wanted something extra small and discreet, so we can shoot inside
stores and restaurants and not look like a giant stupid gaijin with a huge
Nikon rig all the time.  I also didn't want to spend a fortune on one either so I 
settled on the Sony Cybershot W350.  It comes with this gimicky feature called
Panorama Shot.  Basically, you just move the camera in a horizontal flow and
it captures everything in a half circle.  While it is a gimick, it is actually kinda
cool.

I took it with last night to our local ghetto grocery store, and got some interesting
pics.