Martin Nieto

Just some photos I took in Nikko last summer. I think Nikko is one of the most beautiful places I visit in Japan and is just about 2 hrs away from Tokyo. I had a pretty bad weather but still I had a great day. There was no way I could have wasted the day just watching the rain so I ended up so wet like I had never been before and I was so uncomfortable for the rest of the day but it was awesome!.  I just mainly stayed in the touristy shrine area up in the mountain, too bad that they don’t allow taking pictures inside shrines….  I wanted to keep wondering around in the downtown area after I was done with the temples but Nikko was like gosh town in the afternoon with deserted streets and closed stores. I couldn’t find an open store to buy at least pair of sandals to change my soaking wet shoes.  I give up and  just went back to the station to take the train back to Tokyo. Unluckily , I missed the train just for a few minutes and I had to wait an hr for the next one to come.

he was very excited taking pictures from inside in the train the whole 2 hrs ride while everybody was sleeping even myselft, I bet he took a picture of me, too.

Just afew more pics from the Yosakoi I had processed long time ago… They may not be the last ones as I haven’t developed 3 rolls of film I took during this festival. mmm, Well, they may have been ruined by the x-rays as I left the film on my baggage. maybe that’s why I haven’t bother developing any of the rolls of film I took.

This was the first time I used Photoshop to process a batch pictures. I though it was very time consuming but actually its not.  Before I have mainly used lightroom as I can apply a preset to process tons of files I have selected and then just export those pics with a smaller size in just a few minutes. I just mainly do some basic changes in the exposure, fill light, blacks and tone curve, but still sometimes I have to adjust a picture manually like the exposure or other stuff as not always the pictures I took look the same, but most of the time a preset works well with most of my pics…

So now I’m starting to apply actions in Photoshop to a huge batch of files in a folder and  save them automatically, in just a few minutes. I think they look a lot better processed with this the actions in Photoshop than with the presets in Lightroom. I like especially the tones….

I just had a long holiday last week as we got more than 20 inches of snow I didn’t have classes almost the whole week. It was pretty amazing but honestly I would have preferred being at school… I went to take some pics at the beginning of the storm but after a few hours I gave up as it was getting crazy and besides I don’t like snow that much… I took a lot of pics but I ended up not too happy with them. I saw some pretty amazing pics after the storm but I didn’t feel like going shooting with so much snow in the deserted streets… I kinda regret that now but o well… Anyway, I went to the Chinatown new year parade last weekend and I was lucky to get some nice snowy pictures as it was snowing during the whole parade…

I wasted a lot of time of my snow days making the following video… I just got the idea after a saw a time lapse of photos of the snowstorm and then i felt like doing something like that with some Japan photos in Sony Vegas… I think it turned out very cool, now I know what to do with the tons of pics I have….