Touch-Ups

Edited version. Photography by Sean Horrell. Fashion and editing by Sarah Mancuso.

Original photo, with no editing. Photography by Sean Horrell, fashion by Sarah Mancuso

Here’s one of my rare attempts at photo shop.  Sean took this photo on Halloween, in a brief shoot with quickly fading daylight.  I was really proud of the outfit (aimed to be a gothic lolita Harajuku girl), as I spent about a month and a half putting it together.  The whole outfit has about 30 pieces, bought evreywhere from craft stores to sex toy websites to facy jewelry stores for bridemaids’ gifts.  For the record, I made the lace collar and ribbon and yarn hair pieces, and did all my own makeup.

*Ahem*  Self-plug: over.

Anyways, I decided I wanted to try and touch some of these up, and so here’s my first result.

Sean gave me a few breif photoshop lessons before he left the house tonight, the most important probably being how to use curves and hue/saturation manipulation.  As you can see, the difference is kinf of dramatic.  Changes incude:

• Boosting blues
• Changing skin tone in neck, chest, and ears to match the face
• removing stray hairs on the face and shirt
• Changing the hue of the nail polish to better match the other blues in the outfit
• Removing the red from the whites of my eyes and below the nose (contacts and allergies, ack!)
• Sharpening and adjusting the overall brightness and smoothness of individual parts of the picture

I really am quite pleased with it!

On the List: Iceland

Sometimes I like prowling flickr photos of places that have randomly piqued my interest.  Although I haven’t talked about it much here yet, I’m planning on striking out to other corners of the world again in the reasonable future.  So, I’m starting to gather ideas of places I’d like to spend some time in, and thus “The List” is born.

So!  Iceland is on the list.  Just browsing the first few pages of the tage “Iceland” on Flickr, here’s a sample of what I see in it:

Uploaded by ladigue_99: Gullfoss – Iceland

Uploaded by Arnar Valdimarsson: Öxarárfoss in Iceland – Aurora Borealis

Uploaded by stuckincustoms

Uploaded by jonbaldvin: Dawn at Godafoss Iceland

I’ve always wanted to see the Northern Lights, too.

Himeji Castle

Japan has feudal castles, too! This was another activity that involved climbing lots and lots of stairs, and looking at really old things. But pretty old things. Here’s a couple of my favorites:

Main Tower


View from the top floor of the main tower.

Check out the FULL SET for more.

Ok, that’s all you get! I’m off to the States for the next two weeks! It’ll be the first time I’ve been to North America in a year. Looking forward to it; bring it on.

Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto

Fushimi Inari Shrine

Fushimi Inari Shrine is perhaps my favorite place I’ve been in Japan so far. It’s a gorgeous hike up a mountain via a bajillion stairs through thousands of orange gates. The place has a certain serenity to it that I’ve found very difficult to come by on such an overcrowded little island of a country. Parts of it actually felt inhabited by something unseen, like small cities of quiet, forgotten gods. Which, I suppose, is more or less what a shrine is supposed to be.

A quiet stop along the way

The whole walk is actually quite long, and we didn’t do all of it. We made it to main landing on the mountain, from which you can continue on to do a 6km loop around the peak. I’d really, really like to finish the hike someday.

View of Kyoto from the main landing (sepia toned)

These pictures are from my visit to Kyoto with my parents in March. Go check out the FULL SET for pictures of the Gion district in Kyoto, Kiyomizu Temple, and the rest of Fushimi Inari.

Liam Cooke

Originally uploaded by ~inky.  Copyright Liam Cooke 2008 some rights reserved, for noncommercial use only.

My friend Liam Cooke does pretty things with a camera. Especially with futuristic/minimalistic stuff. Go look. Go enjoy.

Tokyo: A City Eye

I spent this past weekend in Tokyo with my good friend Sean Horrell, who is a great photographer, with an especially gifted eye for cities (and who is sadly nowhere on the internet, so I have no links for you). We went to see a concert, but the rest of the trip sort of unexpectedly turned into an extended photography shoot. Honestly, I’m usually crap at catching good things to photograph in cities, but in his company, I noticed loads of shots I probably would have skipped past otherwise. In that way, this shoot was really a group effort (and we shot lots of the same subjects, so having only mine up makes it feel half complete. I promise to badger him into at least setting up a flickr account).

Some samples from Shibuya:

Sean also spotted this row of mirrors that had been cleaned and lined up outside of a hotel, waiting to be taken back inside. It was an amazing find on his part:

We also found this amazing alley in Harajuku lined with murals:

Then we spent some time people watching from a restaurant on an upper floor of a building in Harajuku:

This is just a sampling of what I took. Look at the full set on flicker for the rest. The ones of alley are my favorites, by far!

Japanese Vending Machines 101

As per request of my friend NeoBokrug, I’m putting together a collection of photos of the weird shit you can get in vending machines in Japan. While I have yet to come across the infamous used panties for sale, there’s still an array of drinks and snacks that make me do a WTF face on a daily basis.

First of all, almost all the machines are for beverage vending. Most of them contain coffee, some sports drinks, various teas, a little soda, and the occasional weirdo random drink, such as the melon cream soda in the picture above (if you click on the photo above, I have the stuff labeled in Flickr with notes). Snack machines are much more rare, and when you do see them, they usually contain things like sweet breads and savory donuts. Dear God, how I miss being able to get a bag of Doritos from a machine. You have no idea, until it’s gone. But I digress.

Let’s take a look at some stuff from the vending machines in the school I work at. Took all these with my phone, so they’re not high quality, but you can get the idea.

DRINKS

Robot <3

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I was going for with these, but I knew exactly what the shoot should look like. I’m pretty fond of that little robot, even if it is a cockroach. I often turn it on and watch it walk around the living room, bumping into things and backing up and changing direction. It does the same maneuver if you make a loud noise in front of it, too. It’s a pretty cute little thing, and sometimes it’s almost like having a pet. Except unlike pets, I can’t kill it by forgetting to feed and water it. Hell, not even my plants are that easy.

And then there’s things like life-sized robotic girlfriends, which, as the article points out, takes one’s fondness for robots to a whole new level, but really for the same reasons. I like my robotic pet because I don’t have to *actually* pay attention to it or take care of it. Likewise, you don’t have to care for, talk to, listen to, get nagged by, clean for, by gifts for, or otherwise interact whatsoever with a robotic girlfriend if you don’t want to.

On the other hand, your robotic girl friend is never going to buy you a gift or give you sympathy when you get depressed about being a socially inept hermit. It kinda misses the point of human relationships altogether.

At any rate, I guess I was exploring how bizarre the concept of robotic affection is to me. I think the shots are beautiful and yet undeniably creepy at the same time. Any thoughts?

(And yeah, that’s me, and I took all the shots by myself without a timer).

I put eight shots on flickr total, if you want to see the rest.

Love Hotels

That’s me, lying on a bed in a love hotel in Osaka at around 4:30 in the morning. And yes, the mirror is on the ceiling for the first reason that came to your mind.

Personally, I think one of the best (or at least, most interesting) things about Japan is its apparent schizophrenia with purity vs. hedonism. As far as I can gather so far, it seems that entire country is struggling and expected to uphold an image of perfection and strong morale for most of the day. Japan by daytime is full of citizens who work 12 hour shifts because they should do their job as best they can, who clean their houses, wash their kids, make a square meal and look perfect while doing it all. Then, at the end of the day, they have permission to relax. Let it all hang out for a bit. And it’s that part of Japan where stuff like love hotels come in.

This was on my first trip to Osaka in the fall with K, MB, and B. We came with no hotel reservations, because it was a holiday weekend and every establishment that took reservations was booked solid. We went anyway, and went clubbing for most of the night, dancing and getting unbelievably drunk. When 4 in the morning rolled around, and we needed a place to crash, we took our chances in the seediest of the seedy: a love hotel.

With a little quick talking on K’s part, she managed to convince the host to let two girls share a room, which is generally against the rules. But it was really late, and she explained that we just needed a place to crash, so we paid for our eight hours and selected a room.

In our drunken stupor, we actually selected a pretty swanky one.

Now the sole purpose of these kinds of hotels is to give people a convenient, private, and comfortable space to do it in. You pay by the hour, or by the eight hours, and they actually lock you in the room for the full time span. Your room comes complete with condoms and a menu of sex toys (you can see it there on the coffee table) which someone will deliver to your room and slip through a slot in the door so you don’t have to show your face.

Now of course K and I were sharing the room just to get some shut eye (sorry to dash any hopes that this would be THAT kind of blog post), but since it was our first look inside one of these places, and we were extremely drunk and wound up from clubbing, we spent maybe half an hour laughing at everything it had to offer and taking lots of pictures.

One of the “things” about a love hotel is that all the rooms come in different themes (in fact, I think B and MB ended up in an S&M room). But the deal with this room was indisputably the shower:

(Also note the pachinko machine in the room!)

That giant room behind the frosted glass wall? Yeah. That’s the fucking shower (literally!). Here’s some shots of the inside:

The bathtub, complete with water jets and conveniently places leverage shelves.

The rest of the room, with ample floor space. That grey mat leaning against the wall is presumably to put on the floor for comfortable shower fun.

So! It was pretty amusing. There were also mirrors EVERYWHERE, in case you didn’t notice, as well as a wall-mounted big screen TV. But, I haven’t told you the best part yet. With every eight hour stay, you apparently get one free cosplay outfit (that stands for “costume play” for those you illiterate in nerd speak). They offered us one when we paid, and again, emphasizing the after 4 am drunkeness, K picked out a maid’s outfit. And we tried it on.

I barely fit into the thing, but I think the picture was worth the three minutes of not breathing.

Anyway, that was my experience with a Japanese love hotel.  It surely would have been more fun if I had been there for its intended purpose, but hey, then you wouldn’t have gotten pictures. :)

Newgrange and Knowth: Hanging Out in Ancient Irish Tombs

In the interest of wrapping up the summer trip to Ireland neatly, I have one more post regarding that trip.

We all spent one day poking around archaically old druid tombs. Knowth and Newgrange are both rather large burial mounds, and definitely on the must-see list for cool old shit in Ireland. You can read about them on those Wiki links for the history. They are similar, but each has its own cool thing going on as well.

Knowth, I think, was an actual burial mound. They found a LOT of bones in it, and there are lots of extra little mounds littered around it.

It also has a LOT of carved stones circling the outside of the main mound, and they’re all different:

It also happens to have the longest catacomb in a burial mound in the world, and the coolest part is that it’s been excavated, so you can actually go inside! You can’t wander around freely, but it’s still neat to see. The picture at the top of this post is from inside Knowth.

Then there’s Newgrange. All the Irish people I’ve met have been proud to tell me that Newgrange is even older than the pyramids, and is fact one of the oldest preserved monuments in the world. It has been reconstructed to some extent, especially the outside:

The deal with Newgrange is the way it was constructed. It wasn’t full of bones (there are theories that it may have been more of a temple than a burial mound), and it’s not full of interesting carvings. But, the tomb remains in complete darkness the entire year–except around the winter solstice. At that point, an opening above the entrance permits the light at just the right angle, and the tomb is flooded with sunlight.

The opening in the white stone permits light around winter solstice.

It’s almost impossible to get into the tomb around that time of year. There’s a lottery and everything. But they will do a simulation of what it looks like at other times of year.

And let me tell you, there’s nothing like standing in pitch blackness in a 5,000 year old tomb.

You’re not allowed to take pictures inside the tomb, which is unfortunate, because it’s really very beautiful. I can’t even find a decent picture of the main chamber on the net, so you’ll just have to live with the mystery or go see it yourself!

At any rate, there was lots of pretty scenery around both areas, and the full set of Knowth and Newgrange photos is in my Ireland set on flickr.

FULL SET OF KNOWTH AND NEWGRANGE PHOTOS

* * *

So that pretty much concludes my first adventure in Ireland. I barely stopped moving the whole week. There were other things we did too, of course, like the crazy Welsh circus, Nofitstate. There was also a really lovely rainy day spent at the zoo with Ronan and Pat, where I squeaked over the seals and Ronan ogled at the monkeys and Pat took pictures of us being silly.

Me squeaking over a seal stuffed animal in the zoo gift shop. Photo by Pat O’Reilly.

And there was the night when I was waiting for the late bus with Ronan and Liam and we were sitting on the sidewalk together and some drunk old man walked by and accused me of being a whore. “What’s this? What’s this now? Two in one? Wait till your mammy sees what you’ve been doin’!” And we giggled and I drunkenly sang “Wish You Were Here” on the street.

The last night I was in town, we went back to Fibbers and got smashed and danced and stayed out until 5:00 AM, even though I had an 11:00 AM flight to catch. Aoibhe shook me out of bed at 7:30 in the morning and we somehow made it. Here’s a group shot someone took in the pub that last evening.

From left to right, Pat, Ronan, me, Liam, and Aoibhe.

FULL IRELAND SET

So many good memories. And I’ll be there again, this time for two weeks, in about 60 hours. And it will be full of new memories, ice skating, running around in the cold rain, drunken out-takes, hard cider, English-speaking people, bookstores where I can read the things I buy, clothing stores where the clothes will actually fit me, a touch of awkwardness, and a lot of love.

Look out, here I come.