↑manganite's blog

Hi my fellow ipernity members!

Still we have no groups here, so meanwhile let's play with pseudo groups.

 

Here's another on: It's about black & white!

I think you all have some beautiful black and white captures in your streams, so poste them here. And if you came along a wonderful b&w capture in your friends stream, invite him to this group using the code below

Here comes the code:

 

That's for invitation:

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Hi! That's a excellent example of b&w photography.

Please join us at the b&w pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/14659

********************************************************************

 

And that's for comments:

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Hi! That's a excellent example of b&w photography.

Saw this in the b&w pseudo group.

www.ipernity.com/blog/manganite/14659

********************************************************************

 

 

So copy the code (you know, the stuff between the stars...) and then go commenting

 

P.S.: Please small size only

Taste is always a very personal thing. What I like someone else might is awful. And so it's here on ipernity or on flickr with our pictures. You're at home looking trough your pictures and then suddenly you think 'this one is it!'. You take it, maybe adding some photoshop and than you post it. And then? Some people may like it, some ignore it. It's like a lottery, you can never predict for sure the result.

That a picture is unpopular you'll mostly only notice by  low number of views, comments or faves. Even if you spam the whole page with it, it fails. And you don't really why. Cause most people (liek myself) prefer to say something only about pictures they like, others are just ignored.

So maybe one should directly try to ask people what they think what's wrong with a certain picture. So I will do with this post for the following picture:

 

Fifty meters to go...

It shows a sign marking a railway track crossing the street 50 meters ahead. I took from a lower position with wide angle to get some contrast with the cloudy blue sky. I like very much, the colors are vivid, with good contrast between the red in the sign and the blue sky. The contrast in the sky and sign itself are also strong. it's sharp, not over or underexposured (at least I think so).

So i see not really a big mistake in this picture. Nevertheless almost no one seems to be interested in it. Maybe it's the subject. Is it too conventional? Not extraordinary enough and therefor boring? But I personally like such kind of shots, am I the only one?

Please help, give me some hint what's wrong with this one?

... and the third one could start now. It seems that ipernity is being more and more an own community. For the first time I noticed that more blog posts are about ipernity (854) than about flickr (819) (of course not including an unknown number of posts avoiding the word 'flickr' and using some abbreviations...).

On the other hand anything settles down. Lea ipernity has increased the number of her contacts by about 1000, the week before it was 2000. The number of pictures is constantly increasing, again 100000 new pictures. I think mainly caused by the mass import tool. So some people have transfered their whole stream.

On the other hand I noticed the some people have left ipernity again. Their pages doesn't exist anymore. And I noticed some inactivity on some accounts for more than one week, while they are still active on flickr. So it's difficult to say if the effective number of people is really increasing or stabilized or maybe also decreasing.

Speaking of my own ipernity experience I must say it's more and more positive. The network (due to the superior communication possibilities here) is growing and growing. The exchange with, which was limited on flickr often to 'wow' and 'wow, too', is much more intense and personal. Compared to the total numbers of contacts and members at flickr, reduced possibilities to spread your images in the community, the response is really very high. The number of daily visitors has doubled since last week, soon reaching a value of 100 a day and maybe I'll see the number thousand of total visitors already this weekend. And also the response to certain pictures is high. The first ones have gained more than 100 hundred views in total, or more than 50 different people visiting a certain picture. That's very encouraging, cause to see appreciation to your work is the most motivating thing to go on. And beside bare numbers, the average quality of every single comment is much higher compared to flickr.

And not only the response to the pictures is encouraging, it's also fine that the blog is being visited, read and commented. About 20 (long and meaningful) comments, more than 100 visitors for my last entry. That makes me happy.

So I'll stay on here. Let's see how it will go on...

Some word more about statistics (sorry I'm addicted to this since my childhood...). I like the fact, that ipernities statistics really counts people and not just total numbers. To see that really a lot of different people  are viewing and commenting on your stream is much more meaningful, than anonymous numbers, maybe caused by the same small group of people.

To have  a name and an image connected with a visitor is, even I think so, a key for the success of the networking here. It shifts the communication here on a more personal level. If I can noticed that a certain person i coming again and again to visit my stream or watching my pictures, even not leaving a fav or a comment behind, will help to keep him or her in mind, and motivates you to make a visit in return.

That's enough about the second week. Let's wait for the next one

Maybe just a few words about what I'm doing for my daily outcome. I'm a scientist, or being more exact a physicist, doing optical experiments now for more than 10 years. Part of my job is taking pictures like the one you can see here. In principle I'm doing something like tabletop macro photography, beside the setup is a little bit special. As light source I'm using a laser shining on a crystal where by some magic the frequency of the light is doubled. That means shining in red light and afterwards I got blue light.

Manganite

Behind my crytal is just an old Nikon lens with about 100 mm focal length to image the light on the camera. The camera itself is half a meter away, so the picture is about 3 or 4 times larger than the crystal itself. The camera is very special, cooled by liquid nitrogen to -100°C, so the readout noise is almost neglectable, making it possible to detect almost every single photon coming from my crystal. Or in other words: In a practically totaly dark room I could get good images in seconds :)

In principle this would be the perfect tool for infrared photography, cause it's sensitive up to wavelengths of more than 1000 nm, but unfortunately you have to connect it to a special power device and a computer. So it's nothing what I would call mobile :(

But maybe once I'll try to make images from my laboratory with it...

The job in genaral is really interesting, we are investigating mainly magnetic materials, like the one in the picture. It's Yttriummanganite, and from the family name of these crystals I took my user name, manganite.

If you ask for any purpose of my research, than I can tell you the usual story we have for this: It's i.e investigating how fast I can switch magnetism, so what is the limit of the speed of my harddisc? Or looking for new materials which allow different ways of data storage. But that's far away, so basicaly I'm doing, what is called basic research with no practical immediate use. Therefor it's not so very different from hanging around at a photosharing site :)

Hope, that makes it more transparent who I am. I think it's good thing to know at least a little bit about each other.

Sometimes I'm just clicking through the ipernity network. Choosing someone of my own network, than choosing someone I didn't know from his and so on. Just to get an impression which people are here around and sometimes I find an interesting new photostream.

But what puzzles me is, whoever I visit always there is the message "xxx is in your extended network." So what's my extended network? so is everyone of my contacts other contacts in my extended network? And their contacts also? Wheres the end? And if everyone is Lea ipernities network, are we all together one single extended network? But in this case why this message? It doesn't make sense...

... has passed away and I got the impression settle down a little bit. Just some numbers: Lea ipernities number of contacts increased only by 800 instead of 1000 or 2000 as in the weeks before. The number of pictures increased by 70000 instead of 100000 before. So the whole bunch of people who wanted to leave flickr seems to be here now and their pictures have been almost all transfered. And beside the numbers this is also my subjective impression. I rarely have seen any new familiar face from flickr last week, the part of my flickr contacts willing to move is now here and I don't ecpect much more of them in the near future.

So from now on I think ipernity has to stand alone, attracting people by quality of service, interaction and of course of pictures to motivate people changing to this place or to attract new people not coming from flickr. That will be a hard job, so expect a further slow downed growing. Nevertheless, ipernity posts, docs and profiles are no found in google, so maybe it will be noticed by a large group of people.

On the other I noticed more inactive accounts here. So some of my contacts never appeared here in the last week. So the bare number gives some misleading impression of activity.

But personally I'm very satisfied with the situation here. The number of people looking at my pictures is still increasing, the contact is much more personal and intense, so that's a big plus for ipernity. But it will take lots of time to reach the same quantities than on flickr. But that's a rather secondary thing, cause I will not quit my flickr account. And at the moment I will not buy a pro account here. Two pro's is too much and not really needed, I think. The only thing is, I have to be careful with my monthly uploads. So I stopped transfer of old stuff from flickr, only new pictures are now seen here. But if possible in future I will put more old pictures here, too.

But while I see lot's of positive aspects here, not everything is naturally as I would Iiked it. Still I miss the internationaly, both in members and of pictures. I like to see pictures from Japan, for exmple, but there are only a handful of people beside me posting such images in reasonable number. The German community is very strong here, so lots of discussion is in German. That's okay for me, but it's excluding non German speaking members. And I'm not sure how many Asian or Amarican people will join a mainly German community. maybe most people don't care, but for me it would be a big minus for ipernity. And I miss discussions about photography. Beside lots of 'Hi, I'm also here and dislike flickr at least as much as you' and 'I dislike this and that on flickr and here everything will be better' posts, there is the tendency to use the blogging function just as any other topic free blogging platform. That's a little bit a pity, cause I think there a lot of people want to talk about photography, and the blog function could be used rather good for this purpose. But maybe that will change, otherwise this will be just more an myspace clone, than an alternative to flickr.

Some thoughts about that desire to make things 'better' than on flickr. I think that's rater unrealistic. With a growing number of members there will be the same user behavior as on flickr. Some people for example fear groups cause they expect what's from their point of view misuse of groups. They're right! There will be this misuse appearing in groups, cause what some peopel think is not right others will like. And if the ipernity staff interfere in the use of groups, they will loose customers. flickr staff knows why the let going things on in flickr groups without restrictions. It would give an uproar larger as the last one otherwise. So all the 'bad' things will exist also here after the introduction of groups. Best of groups, comment groups, award groups and so on. It's a natural thing. The influence of certain users on the style of the community is marginal if the community is huge and diverse. Only stuff could have some influence by strict rules and technical barriers. But why should they do? Flickr got 9 million users with out doing such things. I doubt they would be as large in the other case. So dream on while this is an idyllic and small village, but awake if this is going to be a big city.

While we still have no groups here, there's lots of discussion about this topic here. And the majority of people seems to agree in two points (beside many detailed suggestions for different aspects): We need groups here, and groups should handled better than on flickr from both sides, from the technical and from the way they are used by the members.

Before writing something more in detail, two things: Yes, we need groups, and no, groups aren't bad on flickr and will handled here on the long term naturally in the same way.

What is a group? On a place like this, it is two things. It's a pool of pictures and a forum fro discussions, and from that one can distinguish roughly three types of groups:

1. The exhibition type. Pictures are dropped into the pool to be seen by other people.
2. The discussion and interaction type. People met in the group forum to discuss about different topics.
3. The discuss about the pool type. Pictures and discussions are more or less closely related somehow. At least both features are used with equal frequency.

Naturally these are no sharp borderlines, the differences are partly fluent.

In the first group I would put all the groups dedicated to a certain aspect like topic, style or technically points of a picture, and groups sharing images with common secondary properties like popularity measured by views, counts and faves or pure invitation groups. The main purpose of this groups is exhibition of pictures and have two, sometimes identical, user groups, the posters and the viewers, respectively. So people put their bw portrait of girl in Germany in the bw, portrait, girls and Germany group, and if it got's lots of views or favs in a most views or faves group. And if they are invited, they put it in an invitation group.

So this groups are filled sooner ore later by a huge number of pictures having some common aspects, so interested viewers can go through searching for good or interesting pictures. Interaction of the users is low, sometimes no topics posted at all. Such groups are like museums, were artists put their pictures and people come and have a look at them. That's a fair trade, I think, and satisfy a certain desire of being seen and seeing.

In the second type of groups one can find very often technical aspects discussed. They're about cameras, lenses, tools, software, scripts and so on. Sometimes they also have some social aspect, it's a meeting point for people, sometimes accompanied by meetings outside in the real world. The picture pool is here not the main point, sometimes almost no pictures at all in the pool. Interaction and discussion is the point. And also this satisfies a certain desire.

In the third type of groups both aspects came together. People are posting pictures and discussing about them directly, sometimes both things a re independent. Maybe this is the largest type of groups, at least it's the most diverse, I think. Here you can find something like the comments groups, often organizing additional photo contests, you have the pure contest groups with a pool of winner pictures. You have the purpose free fun groups like 'the biggest one', you have very ambitious groups like Utata, people presenting their picture and interacting closely with each other at the same time and many more groups where the forum and the pool are closely connected. And I think for lots of people, especially the more active ones, this is something like the ideal type of groups. The group itself transforms in the ideal case to something like a closely interacting sub community, something like club in the real world.

Yes, indeed, that's a good thing. But it's not better than the other three types. All types are needed, cause the satisfy different desires and so they all should exists side by side. I think it's unfair, for example to accuse someone of dumping and running, if he doesn't always go to tens of pages with certain pictures and gives a comment on everyone (by the way, it has some irony, that the same people often accuse members of comments groups, where you are forced by rules to give a comment, as attention seeking freaks...). They just doesn't see the purpose of such groups and that there existence is appreciated by people who just want to look at certain pictures.

The existence of different types of groups results of the diversity of users. I think that more than 8 million of the 9 million flickr user have no desire in using the community elements of a side like flickr. They just want to have a place where they can easily present their photos to friends and family. And maybe from time to time they have a look at explore or go to a certain group hopping to find a picture about a certain topic. For them the first type of groups is ideal. Another user group I think is looking for help. So they're satisfied by the second type of groups.

And there are the users searching for community. How many? Of course, I couldn't know exactly, but judging from the size of certain groups, the activity in groups and other place I would say it's something like 100000, at least a minority compared to the first user group I described before. Nevertheless this group is he driving force of a place like flickr or ipernity (at the moment this group is here the majority...), due to their activity. But sometimes I fear people forgetting that they're not alone and there are more ways to use a community or especially groups.

What does it mean for this place? This place is full of idealism. Most people are driven by the ida of making everything better than on flickr. So after the start of groups I would expect  a majority of groups belonging to the third type. People will discus a lot and post their pictures. The number of pictures is small, so one can spend some time on looking and commenting. So expect a good start and many happy faces around. But what happens one year, two years later? Either ipernity will die after having a short but joyful life or it will grow. In the latter case we will see that the same 'problems' appear as on flickr. Cause they're only problems from a very narrow point of view, for the broad mass of people they are needed and useful.

So we will have dump and run groups, we will have dead groups with lots of pictures, but no discussion, we will have comments groups, we will have best of and award groups, cause it's natural that they exist. So sooner or later there will be complains about that (even now without groups we already have them). But I don't agree with this.

There's no good and bad in the existence and way of use. Groups may work or not, but that's something different. So what should people do? Wait and have a look what happens and then build up the kind of groups that sweats you and your network in the best way, and let other people do what they liek to do. Do not complain about things you can not influence, maybe you don't like but causing no harm for anyone, just fun for people different from you.

That doesn't mean stopping discussions about technically aspects, that's helpful, especially many technical aspects of flickr groups are not satisfying.

Yesterday I wrote something about different kind of groups and beside one side discussion about the necessity of pictures pools for groups, there was the typical award and comment group bashing.

This kind of bashing is rather popular, not only on flickr also at this small peaceful and everyone is my friend community. So there are discussion threads dozens of people agreeing to each other that this kind of groups is the most evil thing in the photo community world. That reminds me that everyone who you ask tolds you he will never eat at McDonald's and (in Germany) is never reading the 'Bild-Zeitung', while both are making money with out beside the fact they are completely ignored by everyone. Strange such things happen all the time...

It's also strange, that all people I invited to post a picture in my small pseudo groups, has followed the invitation... And the participation in some other game pseudo-groups here is also high. And if you look around at flickr, then you can see that beside 'flickr central'such groups as 'A big fav' or 'the world through my eyes' are with about 25000 members each really big groups you can find hardly otherwise. It's similar for the newer groups of this type. If you have in mind that maybe only 100000 or 200000 user are what one could call actively participating in flickr community stuff, this groups are extremely popular. But I know popular is the opposite of being of high quality. And anyway, as anybody seems to believe the purpose of this groups is only to game explore and used by attention gathering freaks. Strange that some of the groups are older than explore itself, as it was confirmed by flickr staff.

One thing I often notice is that people doesn't exactly know what they are talking about and happily mixing up all types of groups. Award group is not a comment group, and not all comment and award groups are working in the same way. So maybe some definitions at this point.

• The comment groups. The purpose of this groups is to post a picture and in return comment on some other pictures in the pool. Here one can distinguishes two subgroups:

• You are free which pictures you comment on. The classics are the '1-2-3' type groups, or something like 'The world through my eyes', or the newer ones like 'A+++'. So in this way the pictures which are of highest quality get the highest number of comments. Or in other words most popular.
• The next type are the groups where you are not free which picture you have to comment on. Normally it's the pictures next to yours,or the last ones in a small pool. Classic examples are the 'Score me' or 'Delete me' kind of groups. In this case the number of comments is equal for each picture. The purpose is to get some comment on the quality of your picture. This is useful, cause normally you get only positive comments, but in this groups comments are also often negative.

Still asking my self this question to understand why people looking more on some of my pictures than on others. Last pictures I had a deeper look at, was my contribution for the 07-07-07 Group on flickr. You can find the group here:www.flickr.com/groups/07_07_07/

Here and on flickr I posted the same 21 shots taken on that specific day. A large variety of nature, people, landscape or more abstract ones. In color, bw, or toned somehow. All of them you can find here:

www.ipernity.com/search/...

Down to the subway station

As one could expect, some are more appreciated than others. But which pictures are most popular is almost the same flickr and ipernity. Especially the most popular/interesting on of them is the same on both sites. It's the one you can see here. It's the first one of the series and the one which is far ahead counting faves or comments on both sites. In flickr it stayed for some time on the front page of explore, here it you find if still on the start page.

This is no exception, 4 others are also on the same place in this rankings, 3 differ by one position, 6 by three , 2 by four and five, respectively. Only 2 differ by 10 places and one by 13 (which is caused by reaching explore frontpage on flickr, which always boosts interestingness). So statistically the popularity/interestingness ranking is the same on both sites.

'81'

And that's in spite of the different user/contact groups on places. Here it's more centered on Germany or Europe, there it's far beyond that limits. So cultural differences seem not to have so much influence on the first glance. So what is that determines the ranking? What is it, what makes a picture like that above popular everywhere, and a picture like the one on the left unpopular (it's number 18 on flickr and number 21 here) everywhere?

Every comment on the two pictures here, that would clarify a little bit, what makes the one popular (good?) and the other one unpopular (bad?) for you, I would highly appreciate.

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

That's it for the next two weeks. I'm not an ipernity pro user, so I can upload only 200 MB per month which I reached today. So the picture number 98 you can see here, is the last one until first of August.

I reached the upload limit so fast, cause I always upload original versions. I do this for flickr and use the ipernity script to put them here including tags. That's the easiest way and I'll not change it.

I also will not become a pro user here in the near future. Two pro accounts on photosharing sites would be one too much and I still think flickr is the best solution to present all my pictures, share them with family & friends. Simply cause the layout of flickr is much more suitable for this. Pictures on the impernity homepage is only a minor part, but it's the main part for me.

Even though I don't like flickr as company as so many others here, I'm practically not affected by any changes recently done on flickr, I have no pictures which are restricted in anyway and I'm not interested in stuff I would call restricted (which is not equal to flickrs Uncle Bob definition). So for me life over there has not changed much.

Anyway, I like this place, too. And my impressions so fare are very positive. I will continue uploading pictures next month, but maybe not everyone. I think of some 'best of' selection, adding one or two pictures a day. So I can spread my uploads over a whole month.

Meanwhile I will look around here at your pictures, your blogs and maybe writing something from time to time. And if we got groups in the next two weeks, of course I will participate in building up the first ones :)

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

Yesterday, exactly one year ago, it was a Sunday and in the little town we lived in Japan, called Arakawaoki (which was only famous for it's railway station, which you had to use traveling from Tokyo to the booming science city Tsukuba), the local matsuri took place. Or more exactly, the matsuri on our side of the railway. The other side's matsuri was a little bit later.

What is a matsuri? It's a kind of festival held in every place in Japan during the summer time. The most famous one is the Gion matsuri in Kyoto. The origin lays in the Shinto religion of Japan. Every place has is own Shinto shrine where the local Kami, the God, lives.

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

It's the meeting point between the Kami and the people living in his area. But not everyone can go to the Shrine and the Kami can not go into the town. So the idea is to transfer the Kami from the Shrine into a portable Shrine, a mikoshi, and carry him around the town, so that the Kami can have a look and the people can see him. Afterwards the Kami is returned to the Shrine (once we had seen this ceremony in Gion itself. It was amazing).

To make the trip enjoyable for the Kami,

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

the mikoshi is followed by people making loud music and dancing and the mikoshi itself, carryed by young men and women, is always shaken around while people are shouting loudly. So everyone has a lot of fun and small children and elderly people together participate in this festival.

For us this was always a big event and we joined each year the matsuris around our place. But of course, the one in our hometown was very special for us. Being a foreigner in small Japanese

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

town is something like being an animal in the zoo. People are very friendly, but also fearing to came too close in contact with us. So it's not so easy if people always starring at you and hold you on distance. But at the day of the matsuri this was different. People were proud that we joined their festival, were happy that we walked with them through our neighborhood. And as usual we were forced to take a lot of pictures, especially of the children :)

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

So matsuri day was not only for the Kami a happy day, also for us. And when I looked through the pictures yesterday I was a little bit sentimental. Both of us are missing Japan almost everyday. It was a great time in a wonderful country, not always easy, but nowhere live is always easy.

One year ago- Arakawaoki matsu…

I decided to upload a bunch of pictures which, I hope, carry something of the atmosphere of the matsuri to you. The people dancing on the street, the children with their masks, the young men carrying the mikoshi, the light of the paper lanterns, all that I hope you can see and feel the enthusiasm and joy of the people. On matsuri day you will not find this stereotype of the always controlled and quite Japanese. On that day all social and cultural boundaries are forgotten.

Arakawaoki matsuri

So, enjoy the pictures of that day, I posted here again. It's six new pictures, and an old one, taken on the same day but posted long ago...

... is over now and despite I'm still quite satisfied with ipernity there is also I strong feeling of stagnation. To check if this is only some emotional thing or can be based on some numbers I looked around a little bit.

Start with personal experiences. That's not very objective, I know, but nevertheless. That there was slightly less activity on my stream while in the weeks before it was always increasing, might be due to the pictures I loaded up, if they are not hitting the taste of my contacts, there will be no activity. But another thing is more meaningful. I went through my contact list and found easily about 10% inactive accounts over two or three weeks. I know, some people are on summer vacation, but that's not case here, they're still active on flickr. Which holds in principle for all of my contacts with two accounts. Only the genuine ipernity people who hadn't have as contacts on flickr, seem to be only active here. Belonging to some hard core ipernity community, which is numbers rather small.

So that's about me, but what's going around out there? I looked at our dear friend Lea ipernity. She's now slightly above 8000 contacts, something like 500 new compared to the week before (in the beginning she got far more than 1000 a week!). Bot okay, 8000 is still a good number. So we have thousands of active ipernity members here? No! I looked through here network, and on every randomly page in here contact list (contains of 16 contacts each), I found that 30-50% had never uploaded any pictures! Only maybe 5-10% had a significantly high number of pictures (something like more than 50), which I would call then an really active account. The rest has mostly something between 5 and 20 pictures online, which I would call a test account with not much future.

So in principle we have something like 400 to 800 people which are more or less active in a regular way. That's not much! On flickr I would call this a small group, hardly to find.

And this numbers fits to experience I had made concerning canceled accounts. Instead of finding more of my old flickr contacts here (I haven't found any new lat week), some have deleted their account.

Regarding the pictures, one got a similar picture. Before I came in, ipernity has about 107000 pictures. One week later 70000 more. Then there was peak of 103000 new in the following week. After that 77000 new ones, and last week only 41000 new picture. So the total number is till below 400000. And this originates mainly in the complete move from flickr of some members here, which is now almost finished, I think.

Another thing is pseudo group activities. Weeks ago there was a lot of activity, photo contests, photo games, topic groups and so on. A lot of things based on exchanging pictures, looking and commenting on them. Meanwhile the blogging function is more or less only used as a normal blog with diverse topics. So instead of building up a photo centric community, the active part is just building up a community with no special interest in the photos. maybe I'm wrong here, but that's my impression looking through the blog entries of my network.

The future of ipernity is still open, maybe it will grow, maybe end of the year only a few people are left, still agreeing with each other what wonderful place this is and how awful l flickr is. last thing is little bit of what we call in German "Geburtsfehler" I think. the community here is build up from the negative impulse of disliking flickr and not from the positive impulse founding a new community. Ipernity was chosen randomly as the exile of a large, old and mainly German flickr community united in the dislike of flickr. That ipernity may be a better place was an idea build up later, after the move. And it seems that people with a more neutral opinion about both place are now going back or at least slowing down their activities here.

Ipernity needs increase, input of fresh blood to have success, at the moment there is stagnation. I hope we will not see a decrease in future. I myself will be out some days from tomorrow on and, as I wrote yesterday, new pictures from me have to wait until August. Maybe we will have groups then and this place will show more activity afterwards. But honestly, reading some things what groups should be or do, about nightmares on flickr groups and the hope blocking function will work fine, I'm not sure if they will be success in terms of being fun...

...I'm out for a few days.

See you next week, my friends!

Just married...

Due to the monthly upload limit, I can't post this image directly here on ipernity. Therefor by this way I would like to inform you about some changes in my life, my friends...

 

P.S.: Thanks to Christophe Ruelle for changing upload limmits. Now, this picture can be seen also here :)

...and cause I was absent most of the time, not really much I have noticed. It seems the situation is the same as last week, concerning upload of new pictures and new people around here.

Concerning my stream, I must say, that ipernity needs much more efforts to get something back from other users. On flickr it doesn't really matter if you are uploading something new or not, people are coming constantly, having a look, making some comments. But here it goes almost down to zero, if you are not yourself active. But that's mainly due to the low number of users and the nonexistence of groups. So mainly your contacts came around and if there's nothing new, they stay away. It's okay, I do it the same way.

But when I was back yesterday, to really nice things happened. First of all I and my wife are really happy about your kind response to my short message about our wedding (curiously this entry is now a hot topic here on ipernity...). Thanks a lot all of you.

And second I've to thank Christophe Ruelle. When he read yesterday, that I have reached my upload limit for this month, he zeroed my counter and almost doubled my quota. That's really what I would call service! I had never expected something like this :)

A very odd thing I noticed just some moments ago. The start page of ipernity showed three of my pictures at the same time. Thanks to you for viewing my pictures

SS girl

Foreigners have often the image that Tokyo is a modern neon city, with large skyscrapers overcrowded with cool and fancy people hurrying from on event to the other. But it's much more. This area with a size of about 80 times 30 square kilometers is a diverse city with lots contrast, old and new, peaceful and overcrowded side by side. One famous spot where you have this coexistence of supposedly contrary styles and cultures is Harajuku.

When you exit the Yamanote line at Harajuku-eki, you will first be overwhelmed by the crowd in this much too small station. Outside you can cross the street and enter Takeshita-dōri, a narrow street full of small fancy shops and restaurants. There you can get a good impression of japanese youth culture. Even though it takes a while to pass the overcrowded street, especially at the weekend. Maybe during the week it's better.

Hand

Parallel to Takeshita-dōri and perpendicular to the tracks of the Yamanote line directed to the east is Omotesando-dōri. And after a few hundred meter you will enter a completely different world. It's the glamor world of Omotesando with it's Louis Vuitton, Gucci and other luxury shops and first class Hotels. Like Ginza this a place for tourists and rich and modern Japanese who prefer a western lifestyle.

Following the Yamanote to the south you will come to Shibuya. Beside Ikebukero or Shinjuku this the part of Tokyo which comes closets to what I have described in the beginning. The neon lights and the jungle of shops and department stores. And that's the place where trends are created which spread first around Japan and then often around the whole world.

The girl with the purple paras…

On the west side of the station is the Yoyogi park, which you enter through a huge wooden torii. Inside the park the is the Meiji-jingu, one of the main Shinto shrines in Tokyo. It's dedicated to emperor Meiji with the rising of modern Japan at the end of the 19th century is closely connected. If you are lucky you can watch a traditional japanese wedding inside the shrine. If you pass the shrine and leave the park on the north side, you're in Shinjuku, where on the one hand you have Tokyos most impressive skyscrapers and on the other side of the railway tracks you find one of Tokyo's traditional red light areas.

Harajuku couple

Going back to Harajuku, just in the center, next to the station on a bridge over the railway tracks of the Yamanote line, which everyone who wants to enter the Yoyogi park has to enter, you find the cosplayer. Especially on Sundays you can find dozens of them on the bridge. Sitting around and chatting with each other, taking pictures and being photographed by the people passing the bridge, posing for them or with them. For most tourists it's an attraction itself, others are distracted by them on their way to the Meiji-jingu.

Harajuku girl

Most of the cosplayers are young girls, teenagers wearing costumes of their favorite heroes from mangas, anime, movies or music. You can find everything, traditional yukatas, gothic outfits and science fiction stuff; extraordinary make-ups and hairstyles or masks hiding parts or the whole face. It's an exciting and cool place at the same time. And if you like to take pictures, it's a perfect place. They like to pose and they can pose perfectly. No one with the stereotype image of the emotionless, every time controlled Japanese, no one who sees the uniformed children going to school and knows about the military like discipline in japanese schools mith imagine that this is also genuine behavior of young Japanese. And I guess most of them you wouldn't recognize as cosplayers during the week.

Cosplayer

I really liked that place. Taking pictures (and there was no other place in Japan I was more satisfied with the pictures I took than here in Harajuku) or just sitting their and looking what's going on. Looking at the tourists, trying to take a picture of them or Mum and Dad taking a picture of their child in group of cosplayers. The old Japanese lurking around and taking pictures, and the young cosplayer taking pictures of their older idols. I had always the impression of a somehow friendly place, having in mind how a place in Germany full of gothic style young people would look alike...

Cosplay profile

Meanwhile cosplay is not only a Japanese thing. On the Japanese day in Dusseldorf their were a lot of German cosplayers, I saw them in Cologne and even here in Bonn I saw some. But, it's definitely not the same. It's not only that the costumes are not nearly as perfect as in Harajuku, it's the people themselves, somehow they are not cool enough and it doesn't look genuine. It's a copy, and not a good one. They cannot pose like them, they have not the same look and the behavior doesn't fit. It's not enough to wear the costumes, you most have the same cultural background. Maybe in a society where you are always free to express yourself, it's nothing special to wear a curious costume, it's more like carnival then a break out of the boundaries of society. I don't know, but some difference must exist.

No emeotions?

One year ago: Kashiwa shrine

Summer in Japan is not only the time of the local matsuri festivals, it's also the time for great firework events. So the day before yesterday, one year ago, I decided to join the 'hanabi taikai', a big firework in Asakusa, Tokyo. Cause sun rises rather early in Japan, firework is held around 8 or 9 pm, usually, but still plenty of time to do other things before.

Hello Kitty & friends

So on my way from Arakawoki in the north of Tokyo, I stopped first in Kashiwa. Kashiwa is at the northern border of Tokyo suburbs. It's still in Chiba prefecture, but there is no free space till Tokyo, only concrete...

One year ago: Jizo statue at Z…

Around Kashiwa station itself it looks like every station in Tokyo area, lot's of big department stores, shops, restaurants and so on. So nothing special in principle. But day the local matsuri was held, so I walked around a little bit, had a look at the local shrine and at the stalls selling food, drinks, sweets or toys. The main attraction, the carrying of the mikoshi through the streets had not started, so left and went further south to Tokyo.

One year ago: Little Jizo with…

In Tokyo I went out at Tamachi station. It's in the southeast on the Yamanote ring line, near Tokyo bay. From their I walked to the west, in direction to Roppongi hills, one of the main spots in Tokyo, popular especially for westerners living in or visiting Tokyo. You find there shops with western food and other consumables. Very expensive place to live...

One year ago: Little Jizu stan…

But I stopped before, at Zoji-ji, a buddhist temple in the shadow of Tokyo tower, Tokyo's small version of the Eiffel tower. I went there cause of the long rows of Jizu statues with their red caps and windmills in their hands. This little guys look rather funny, but are symbols of sad things. If child dies, born or unborn, the parents can rent a Jizu statue at a temple, then it will get a red cap and the parents can put flowers or the most loved toys of their child there, so it's like grave a memorial place. It's a strange ritual for western people used to mourning and sadness if death comes to their families. But in some sense it's maybe more suitable.

One year ago: Tokyo Tower

After taking some pictures of the Jizu I went to Tokyo tower, but did not enter. In two years Japan we never managed it to went up to the top :(

One year ago: Behind the scene…

From their I took the train to Asakusa. That's one of the most famous tourists spots in Tokyo. Around the Senso-ji temple with it's well known entrance gate with the huge lampion inside, the high pagoda and the main hall you can buy anything you have in mind thinking of Japan. There're shops for kimono, yukata, geta, katana and all the other japanese stuff tourists want to buy...

One year ago: Police girl

But not Senso-ji was the place I wanted to go, it was the Sumidagawa, one of the main rivers in Tokyo. A long it's shores the firework was held. The event was called "hanabi taikai" where as 'hanabi' (sorry that I'm to lazy to switch on the kanji mode) stands for firework. It consists of two parts 'hana' which means 'flower' or 'blossom' and 'bi' which means 'fire'. So the whole means literally 'fire blossom" which describes it very well, I would say.

One year ago: The thing on the…

Even though I had two or three hours until the firework was intended to start, the place was rather crowded already. Lots of streets were blocked and they just started to slowly close the bridges. But really slowly. It took more than an hour and they didn't blocked it at once, they just narrowed it more and more in several turns. I waited there until the last turn, so I crossed the bridge with a row of policemen behind me. But that's no problem their, everything is very friendly and nobody is aggressive. That's completely different from my last firework experiences here in Germany, in Bonn, Dusseldorf and Cologne. Everyone is eager to get the best place, people are very aggressive (on man starts half a way to knock me down cause he thought I was steeling his place). Too much stupid folks are around here. I'm not sure if I will go their again next year...

One year ago: On the way

Back to Tokyo. I decided to search for a good place at the northeast side of the river, and first waited in a crowed of young people sitting around in their yukata, waiting for the firework. As so often, when they saw my camera they started laughing and posed while showing me the 'v' sign with their fingers. It's hard to take a picture of Japanese people not showing this 'v' :)

One year ago: give me a 'V'

But when the firework started, I noticed I had chosen a bad place. Half of the rockets vanished behind the high building next to the bridge along the river. So I started searching for a better place. First I went away from the river and then in northwest direction back to it. So I was some hundred meters away from the bridge. There I was standing, having a perfect view on the firework, in a crowed of young people, that was no problem, beside that the place was not meant for staying around. But always when a policeman came, I suddenly forgot all of my Japanese language skills (not very high anyway...), so I made it their up to the end of the firework.

Hanabi Taikai

Maybe you're wondering that I had the time to walk around searching for a good place. But that was no problem at all. I looked at the time when I took the firework pictures. It was about 80 minutes between the first and the last one! So people here get exited when a firework took 30 minutes, that was almost 3 times longer...

One year ago: Hanabi Taikai

When it is was over I started slowly to move back to Asakusa station. Still taking some pictures, so when I arrived their, it was nearly as worse as I had expected, concerning the amount of people around. But Japanese are used to organize the movement of huge crowds of people and while the people themselves are patient enough, everything goes very smoothly. That's what I loved Japan for, avoiding unnecessary trouble, while the aggressive egoism here produces always trouble. Even with much less people around here, you have much more stress moving around. I really don't like it...

 

One year ago: Going home

The 'hanabi taikai' was one of three firework events I joined in Japan. The next day we went to the small city of Oyama for the firework, and the year before we joined the national fireworks contest in Tsuchiura. It's the final event of each firework season and maybe the most impressive one cause of the variety of styles you can see there.

One year ago: the firework is…

That's all I have to write, beside to wish you much fun with the pictures around :)