[PlayRaw] Couple Impressions of my Japan Trip

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Hey People,
i wanted to share some pictures from my Japan Trip from the beginning of the year.
I went with a couple of my online friends which i have known for over 10 years now.
It was a 2 Week trip at the end of march and we were quite lucky because of cherry blossom season.

I also posted these edits to my instagram but iam still not 100% sure if i like them :smiley:
I am quite new to the hobby of photographying/editing. I most of my 1300 pictures are out of focus :skull:

The first image is from a small island near Tokio in Enoshima. Its a small island which is mostly consisting of cafes, temples and small shops as well as a small garden.

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The second picture is from Meguro River which is super packed in the evening with people and all kind of food stalls in the main cherry blossom season. There is also one of my favourite vinyl cafes nearby: Epulor if anyone is in the area sometimes pls check it out :smile:

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This last picture is from a hiking trip i did alone on my last day in Japan. Early in the morning i gambled on getting the train to Nikko (didnt look for train tickets beforehand and you have to book the online before. Luckily i got the last train ticket). Then i drove with a bus further into the mountains where I hiked 10km until i reached a small village in the mountains which has a lot of onsen hotels. On my hike i met an old korean guy and after talking and hiking together we decided to hit the onsen and drink a beer :smiley:
On my way back i stopped at a waterfall near nikko (which is the third highest waterfall in japan if i remember correctly) and at the nearby lake i shot this picture of a lone man fishing in the lake.
This day is currently my favourite day in my life and this picture is currently my favourite picture i took so far.

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But like i said i am still unsure about the edit. I posted it to instagram and wont remove it because it shows my editing skills at the time and its fun to look back at it in a couple of years to see how i have grown. So have fun editing

This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.

EDIT: I uploaded the wrong raw file for one of the images :smiley:

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What I did: Denoised, more light on the foreground, a bit of work on colors.

Apparently not the same snap as the one posted above ?

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So it sounds like this image represents something very personally valuable given the ties to your experience of that day. I am not sure what value there is to be gained by an open call to edit the image differently. I would never open your journal/diary and presume to tell you what you should have written, or that some other version of events is a better entry.

That said, is there something about the image where you could not get it to feel right…someplace where the way it turned out didnt match what you were trying to convey (to future you)? IMO, this is perhaps a more valuable line of inquiry.

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Edited with Ansel:

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Nice shots! I went for simple edits with the usual Darktable 5.7.0+ and spektrafilm. All photos from Japan yearn for film right? :smile:

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Oh yeah it seems like i picked the wrong raw file from my hard drive whoops :smiley:

But i shot the on burst so they are probably the same.
By the way i love that color grading you did :heart:

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My thinking in making an open call is just to get another perspective on how people would edit a picture i like.
I wouldnt change the edit i did. Because it represents my skills and how i felt before going to bed that night :smiley:

I am mostly unsure about how to edit background and the lighting. Because of the haziness (probably something an edit wont really fix). It also reminds me that i have a lot to learn when it comes to photography. Mostly composition, lightning and just being patient sometimes.

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Cropped the bottom guardrail while keeping the frame composition, colder White Balance, worked the color grading until I got a ‘decent’ blue sea, and then all the rest followed, sharpen a bit a the end.

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Darktable - Spektrafilm

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I see it as a bright, daylight scene. Yours looks great, too.

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Just some laptop edits:

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Darktable - Spektrafilm

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For this variant, I tried to go green… Maybe not realistic enough ?

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