Aurora Borealis, taken on 1 January 2022 in Kirkenes, Norway.
Category Archives: Travel
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge
I was lucky enough to escape the country and visit Galaxy’s Edge Orlando last week. Good lord. You can see where that billion dollars went.
And if you see those queue times for Rise of the Resistance and wonder if it’s worth it, absolutely yes. Get there early and go straight there.
iPhone 11 Pro night mode
For the first time, the iPhone 11 Pro is a phone that I feel entirely comfortable using as my sole snapshot camera. Literally, the only thing it doesn’t do better than my point-and-shoot (which is no slouch) is zoom, which may be an insurmountable problem for the smartphone form factor… or it may not.
I’ve been away twice since I’ve had it, to Berlin and Paris, and it’s been phenomenal, but here I want to showcase its night mode in particular with a few samples. Some of the following shots are lit by little more than a few candles.
It’s uncanny and impressively naturalistic – it almost always looks like a properly exposed night shot rather than an artificial day shot.
My Nikon DSLR will always remain the king, but when I don’t want to carry around a few kilos of camera and lenses, this will do.
Shenmue: A pilgrimage to Yokosuka
On my recent trip, I fulfilled a long-held ambition by visiting Dobuita Street in Yokosuka, one of the primary locations in one of my favourite games ever, Shenmue.
It’s fairly out of the way for a day trip from Tokyo, but it’s only 20 minutes or so down the train line from Kamakura, which is a spectacular day out in its own right. Fortunately, we’d decided to go there, so I was able to abandon the group for an hour to pay a visit.
Found at the end of the conveniently named Yokosuka Line, Yokosuka is dominated by its harbour. It’s the home base for the US Navy in Japan and, as such, you don’t have to look very hard for sailors. Many were drunk, but they neither called me schoolboy nor tried to serve me milk. I couldn’t see any forklift racing going on in the harbour, but there was a trio of Japanese submarines lined up in rather photogenic fashion.
Dobuita isn’t far from the station, requiring only a short walk through a pleasant naval-themed park and crossing a footbridge outside a mall that you can’t really miss. It starts around here if you find yourself making the same trip.
Appropriately enough, the weather did turn to rain that day – the only bad weather of the trip, really. But before rejoining the collective for dinner back in Kamakura, my usual reticence to pose was overcome for a quick look for sailors outside Tom’s hot dog stand bar.
Mission accomplished.
Returning to Japan
It’s been 11 years since I last went to Japan, which seems particularly long given that I went twice in the space of a year back then.
I’m going back in less than a month, and this time will be particularly interesting. For one thing, I’m going with a much-reduced interest in games, which was always one of the attractions before. I’ll check in at Akihabara once or twice, of course, and I might try to squeeze in a visit to Yokosuka, but this time I’m going to be travelling all over, from Osaka to Hiroshima, Hakone to Miyajima. Maiko performances and onsens rather than afternoons spent in Super Potato. I’ll be with friends, most of whom have never been before and couldn’t care less about whether my Dreamcast games have spine cards.
I doubt I’ll be doing anything resembling blogging beyond a few updates on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But expect photography. Lots and lots of photography. I have two cameras, unlimited data, a lot of cloud storage and, by God, I know how to use them.
Oxford in autumn
Apropos of nothing in particular, just some photos I took on a recent walking tour, making the most of a clear day and that gorgeous low autumn sun. All taken on an iPhone 6.
