Japan is an interesting country sometimes. For example, December 24th was some sort of national holiday (I think the previous emperor's birthday or something) and December 25th was just a plain old work day. But come the end of the year the place pretty much shuts down for New Years. I'm off from the 30th through the 6th and there's only so much sitting and staring at my computer that I can do for that many days in a row. So today I got up and took a little hike around town.

I took along a 1950s Ricoh 35 DeLuxe rangefinder, a spare roll of film, and also my K100D with a 28/3.5 mounted and a 55/1.8 in my pocket.

By happenstance, I took two photos which both inspired the title "End of the Line":

Both S-M-C Takumar 28/3.5

[J.Scott]

Fitting title Mike. Looks like you had a productive walk. The images have a slightly blue cast to them; are you using negative or positive film? Just wondering where the blue comes from.

I finally got my Yashica Lynx 14E back from the loving hands of Mark Hama and it works as smooth as silk. I loaded it up with Fuji Superia 100 and am anxious to try it out. But sadly, our holidays are over - it's back to work for me today.

For those interested here is a pic of a Ricoh 35 Deluxe. There is just something special about using a camera almost 60 years old. I guess I am in a nostalgic mood.

[JCSullivan]

Well Mike, I've never seen the word happenstance so had to look it up - interesting.

You must live in a fairly-sized town/city as the images you show (in this post) look quite chaotic - so un-Japanese (my thinking). I was imagining a more romantic Japan, silly me and my idealism.

[jshurak]

Hey Mike, Happy new Year's! When I woke up, I had received an email from my buddy in Tokyo. He was in the palace. They open the inner palace to the public twice a year. The emperor's birthday and the 2nd of January.

[Mike Cash]

The blue cast came from The GIMP (these photos are from the K100D) because I'm still having fun playing with split toning. Could you tell me (if you don't mind) about what the servicing from Mark Hama cost? I have four Yashicas I'd like to send him: Yashica D TLR, Yashicaflex A2 TLR; YE35 GSN; and a YE35 GTN. They all work....I'd just like to get them serviced while there's still somebody like him around to do it.

The town I live in has a population of about 120,000 give-r-take a few. Japan is only romantic and unchaotic in tiny little pieces here, there, and far between. It's part of why I don't do landscapes and just in general have very little use for wide angle lenses.....There are so many distracting elements so crammed together that you pretty much have to use telephoto or crop to get the crap out of the way.

And, yes, the Ricoh 35 DeLuxe is a fun little camera. B-500 Seikosha shutter, f2.8-16 45mm lens. The best and easiest to focus of any of my rangefinders, yet with neither parallax correction nor even framing lines. No meter = no batteries. The coolest thing about it is that rapid-wind trigger on the bottom.

Here are a couple of shots taken with it:

[daacon]

Very nice Mike - hope you enjoy the break! Interesting on the cemetery are there a lot of those in Japan? I would have thought with land at such a premium there would not be many burial grounds.

[Mike Cash]

Oh, they're all over the place and more going up all the time. With a rapidly aging population senior citizen day care and death-related businesses are booming.

I've got a couple of poor snapshots I took the other day of a place where they were widening an old road to a nice modern four-lane....except for one little section where there was a cemetary in the way, right on a corner. Construction must have been halted for over a decade, I guess. Everything else was finished but that one little corner. I thought that it would be that way forever. But last week I went through there and there were crews out moving graves over to an adjacent lot that had been prepared for them.

Moving them isn't half the hassle it would be in the U.S. For one thing, with a certain very few exceptions, the law requires cremation here. So it isn't as though they're having to dig up caskets. As best I can tell, there is nothing dug out at all. It seems as though the base of the gravestone is hollow (or there's a hollow area beneath it) and the bones are placed in there. Bones remain because the cremation process doesn't include the bone pulverizer common in the west.

Also helping a bit with the space problem is the fact that those tombs don't normally represent individual graves. They're the tomb for a whole family, with everyone's bones going in there together. Sometimes rural farming families will have their own small family cemetary right out in their fields; it's not an uncommon sight. But cemetaries do tend to eat up quite a bit of real estate all the same.

[daacon]

<snip> Moving them isn't half the hassle it would be in the U.S. For one thing, with a certain very few exceptions, the law requires cremation here. So it isn't as though they're having to dig up caskets. As best I can tell, there is nothing dug out at all. It seems as though the base of the gravestone is hollow (or there's a hollow area beneath it) and the bones are placed in there. Bones remain because the cremation process doesn't include the bone pulverizer common in the west.

Also helping a bit with the space problem is the fact that those tombs don't normally represent individual graves. They're the tomb for a whole family, with everyone's bones going in there together. Sometimes rural farming families will have their own small family cemetary right out in their fields; it's not an uncommon sight. But cemetaries do tend to eat up quite a bit of real estate all the same.

Wow that was interesting thanks for the update - it makes perfect sense.

[Mike Cash]

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it is nice when one can foster a few hundred extra words of friendly discourse.

[PaulAndAPentax]

Excellent shots....I know what you mean about having to crop stuff out. It seems that inside the city in Jacksonville its tough to get some shots because of 'stuff'...but the beach will usually cooperate! Very nice work!

[J.Scott]

Could you tell me (if you don't mind) about what the servicing from Mark Hama cost? I have four Yashicas I'd like to send him: Yashica D TLR, Yashicaflex A2 TLR; YE35 GSN; and a YE35 GTN. They all work....I'd just like to get them serviced while there's still somebody like him around to do it.

I sent you a private message regarding Mark Hama.

[roentarre]

These shots have the best B+W conversion I have seen. The first shot is my favorite.

[Mike Cash]

Thanks, Jeff. Reply sent.

Thanks for the compliment on the conversion, roentarre. I'm still working with that blue/orange split-tone process and I'm finding that it seems to do a good job on conversions which aren't so obviously split-tone. Instead of merging the layers down at 100% I drop them to about 60%. Also, prior to doing the merge I add a new white layer (just plain white) on top and set the mode to "Saturation" at about 20-30%.

As usual, I do my levels, contrast layer, curves, and USM on the color version first, then decompose to RGB in separate layers. After that I examine each layer individually to decide which to use as a base. Then I spend a while playing with the other two layers in various blend modes/percentages to enhance the image. The cemetary photo, for example, had the red channel as the base, with the green channel on "Burn" at 100% and a diagonal layer mask to only affect the sky portion, and the blue channel on "Addition" at 50% and a diagonal mask to only affect the rest of the photo. The photo had been exposed for the sky, leaving the foreground rather dark. Layer masks saved the day on this one. After all that came the split-tone mumbo-jumbo, of course.

[roentarre]

Mike. I have tried to add an adjustment layer with gradient on the original background image - white to black gradient which could get rid of the high contrast.

It reduced the dark tone but increase the soft touch to it