onward to hiroshima
today i took a shinkansen from osaka to hiroshima, and walked around the city a bit.
the train
i only took a couple photos from the train, but i am still dedicating a section of this post to it because i have become such a train enjoyer on this trip.
trains, especially bullet trains, are such amazing pieces of technology. i am just imagining how much more of a headache a trip of this length would be if i was coming from japan to america. i’d have to take ridiculous several hundred dollar uber trips between cities, and there would be multiple $20-50 ubers just to get to places within the city i am in. america must kind of suck to vacation to.
my first sight when walking out of the train station was pretty great too:
the hotel
for hiroshima, i am staying at a hotel rather than an airbnb - the sheraton grand hiroshima hotel. i chose a hotel rather than an airbnb here because when i was planning the trip, i imagined a nightmare scenario where every place i stay is loud and tiny and i didn’t get a good night’s sleep for weeks straight. that didn’t turn out to be the case, but i wanted at least a couple nights in a larger, more likely to be quiet room. and that’s exactly what i got. also a bonus, the hotel is connected to the train station i arrived at.
this hotel room featured an extremely rare object in japan accomodation… a chair!! and a desk!!!!!!!
finally i can write these blogs in a real chair and not sitting in bed slowly hurting my back!
a short walk around town
this actually happened before checking into the hotel, as i was a couple hours early. i walked around the area to get a feel for it. i also stopped in a cafe inside the hotel.
you may notice the evangelion picture above. i’ve posted a few pictures of evangelion popping up in unexpected places. as someone who is currently watching evangelion for the first time and not thinking it is particularly good, it is kind of strange to me. i get that it is a very popular piece of japanese media, but there are other things that are just as popular that i don’t see everywhere. i don’t see godzilla or dragonball or one piece nearly as often, and i feel like all 3 of those are more popular than evangelion. not sure what the deal is.
shutter speed
i have wanted to take some long exposure photos since i got the camera. but the view from all the places i have been saying has just been a small alleyway with a giant building 30 feet away blocking any sort of view. this place had an awesome view, so i could take a few.
when you take a photo, the camera has a sensor on it that takes in light. the shutter on the camera opens for a very very brief time, letting that light in, and then quicky closing. when you take long shutter speed photos, if the things in your photo move, it causes them to blur. this can often just look bad, but if you plan for it, you can get some cool photos. since i don’t have a tripod, and the camera has to be perfectly still for photos like this, i ended up doing a weird balancing game of putting the back of my camera on top of my wallet and the lens cap for the camera to angle it down. then i used the phone app for my camera to remotely make it take the photo so i wouldn’t move it by pressing the button on the camera itself.
i took one more that i am going to separate from the gallery because i think it is one of the coolest photos i took of the trip.
the people were moving so fast that the long shutter speed basically blurred them so much they don’t exist in the photo. but their feet stayed in place while walking just long enough to barely exist in the photo. makes it look like ghosts walking through. i am so proud of this photo. to be clear, this is just two people walking.
thats it for april 9!
