it is snowing on mt. fuji
today was a very informative and slightly frustrating lesson in photography and photography editing.
people who read my posts last year may recall that i did a similar tour last time, but it was pouring rain or zero visibility the entire time. i never saw the mountain at any point during the tour last year. i made some lemonade out of it though, got some great photos despite the weather.
this year i chose a different tour, because the one last year inexplicably stopped at a mall in gotemba for 2 hours and i didnt really feel like doing that again. so this tour was solely focused on taking us to areas where you can get great photos of fujisan.
at the very beginning of the tour, the guide told us that there is a “mt. fuji visibility index” and that visibility for today was a 10/10. this apparently only happens very rarely, so my hopes were up. regardless, i knew it would not be the catastrophic failure that happened last year.
our first stop was oishi park. along the way, we got our first (and spoilers, by far the clearest) view of mt. fuji of the day.
oishi means “big stone”. not to be confused with “oishii”, which means delicious. i am not sure why it is called this, as i dont think there are any big stones here. this area is famous for 2 things - lavender ice cream and tour buses full of people being dropped off to eat lavender ice cream and take pictures of mt. fuji.
i want to take a moment here to show off the magic of photo editing. this day has convinced me that photography is actually a school of sorcery and witchcraft. im going to show some unedited photos alongside the finished product. email readers will be disappointed here, since the email is only going to have the unedited photos. i do not believe this was actually a “10/10 visibility index” day, as the mountain was becoming harder and harder to see over time.
the primary thing at work here is a photo editing tool called dehaze, which is “a tool or function that reduces or removes atmospheric haze, fog, or smog from an image, enhancing clarity and contrast.”
but there are other tools being used here. cropping the image, using ai to remove people, and the savior of the day - ai assisted spot healing. turns out my lens was dirty and i had no idea all day. the following picture shows how dirty my lens was:
this wouldn’t have been as noticeable for most photos, but a side effect of cranking the dehaze to maximum makes it very obvious. but i was able to remove them using ai, and that is awesome. nearly every photo i took today would have been ruined without this. the finished version of this photo is below:
because the editing process is so intensive for these photos, a few of these took over an hour for me to edit a single photo.
we grabbed some lavender ice cream (it was quite good) and took a few more photos before heading to our next destination.
i am told this is shohei ohtani, and some readers will find a photo him being on a vending machine advertising green tea very funny.
our next stop was a lawson (convenience store like 7-eleven) with a view of mt. fuji in the background. some people may have heard of something like this before - there was a lawson with an incredible view of mt. fuji that attracted thousands of tourists every day, and they were littering everywhere, parking illegally just to take photos, and blocking the road. so the city put up a giant mesh barrier to obstruct the photo because it was disrupting local businesses and causing issues for local drivers. the below photo is not mine, but this is what the old spot looked like:
NOT MY PHOTO
i have since learned that the barrier has been removed. but our tour still went to a different lawson store that also has a view of fuji.
this is another great spot for a before/after editing example:
next stop was lunch. we were given options ahead of time, and i went with a-5 wagyu beef.
i made a very funny mistake here. the tour guide told us we were short on time, and had to eat and be back in the bus in 20 minutes. so i sat down, saw the obviously raw meat, and thought “huh, i guess wagyu is safe to eat raw” and started eating. it was pretty good honestly. but it turns out they forgot to light the coal under my plate when they set the tables up, and i was supposed to cook it… i think i ate 6 pieces before i realized. they apologized profusely to me for forgetting to light the coal, then lit it and i enjoyed the rest of it. it was great!
our next stop was a really weird choice for the tour to make. there are 2 spots with famous views of fuji in this area, hikawa clock shop and arakurayama sengen shrine. the tour decided to stop between both of them and then not give us enough time to do both. you could either walk 20 minutes to the clock shop and hope fuji is visble, or walk 40 minutes and climb four hundred stairs to the shrine. whichever one you chose, even if you only stayed for 5 seconds and came back, you wouldnt have enough time to go to the other and back before we had to leave. i think this is a dumb decision. either stretch the tour out longer or cut time elsewhere to fit in both. in fact, the itinerary shown when buying tickets for this tour clearly devotes time to each of them separately. so i feel kind of annoyed that the actual tour doesn’t.
i chose the shrine. i didnt climb all 400 steps, but i ended up going about halfway up. i was able to get another goshuin (shrine stamp) for my book, and i picked up a book + goshuin for my mom, who did not join me all the way up there.
don’t worry guys, mt. fuji is totally visible from here, see:
finally, i can smook in peace.
dateline be like “this town had a secret” :
“a dark secret” :
our final stop was oshino hakkai. this was the first stop on my tour last year, and i barely got to see it because someone was 45 minutes late. so i am glad it was part of the tour this time too. i got some amazing photos here:
anyway, that is probably the longest i have ever spent working on a blog post before.
じゃあまたね!
