Friday evening: "Gaidai Summer Gala"

Light-ish warning: My jury-rigged hard drive is a little too jury-rigged, it would seem, and it's being fritzy. Because of that, I didn't process these pictures at all, and they're the massive, 10.2MP 2.xMB JPGs my camera spits out. In sum: they will probably load slowly. Especially for you, Wash. I''m hoping to take care of this today, but I'm not sure I can fix my drive and write the other two blog posts in addition.
Maybe I'll just put one up as a gallery...
When I went to this, I figured I would take pictures and be bored pretty much the entire time. "So... why'd you go?" you might ask. I mean, you just might.
In large part because it was the largest gathering of study-abroad students in one place, and I didn't want to miss out on cool stuff.

That there was free food and drinks may have been what clinched it for me, but I'll never tell.

Aaron Poulliot (sp?) did some juggling stuff on stage. He dropped stuff a couple of times, but I thought he was really good. The fact that handled the drops so well only made it better, I think.

You can see him at left, dancing with his juggling clubs, or at right with his recipe for disaster that he likes to call "eggs". I understand he almost threw one into a speaker, but I didn't see it first-hand.


The school had at least two photographers there (not counting me, 'cause I don't get the cool armband), plus a three-person camera crew (at right). And I think every Japanese person has at least one camera. And there about 250 people. So there are plenty of pictures of this event.

From a photographic standpoint, I don't think I had a lot of options, so I used the very high-level, pros-only (sarcasm!) "Nuke 'em till they glow" flash method and turned my flash up to full power for every shot. Went from 80% charge to 30% charge in about 70 pictures, so you can see the drain of the flash on the battery, which can give me 400 pictures on the same amount if I don't use a flash. I had a spare with me, of course.

Here are two of the school's photographers. I call the girl on the left "Canon chick" because, well, she uses a Canon (whose model I can't recall right now) and she's kinda cute.
The guy at right is... I forgot his name, he's the guy that helped me check over my Japanese camera terminology stuff. We took pictures of each other whenever we saw each other, working especially to catch the other by surprise. He's an Olympus shooter, probably a 410, but I didn't get a close look.

This is Asano (at left), one of people who works in the international exchange office, which is what keeps us alive and out of jail here in Japan. They help us with banking, paying bills, laws, and all sorts of things. Her English is pretty good.

At right is Kumada (in the purple), who deals mostly with people who are not yet in country, but she also helps us a lot. She also works in the international office. The thing that surprises me the most is that she's able to pull off so many different fashions, and do a pretty good job of 'em.

About halfway through the gala, I ran into a student from the dual-language class I TA (?) in. I wish my Japanese was as good as her English, but it's nowhere near. Her friend took a picture of us, and here it is. My camera seems to do strange exposures whenever other people take pictures with it, but I don't know why.
I just press the shutter button; they just press the shutter button. Where's the difference?

After they kicked everybody outside, I met up with Bryen, who wanted an action shot. He was trying to flirt with this girl, but she was completely and skillfully cold-shouldering him. "Well played!" is what I kept thinking. We had her take a picture of us in "action poses", and you're all probably familiar with my silly basic stance, but here's another picture, just in case you aren't.

Don't worry, I'm almost out of decent, relevant pictures. I'll finish up in just a couple more paragraphs. Hopefully.

Ran into Chise, my student assistant a couple of times. She is looking good, as she is wont to do.
I'm trying to get her to introduce me to her boyfriend, 'cause he's a gamer , but he's apparently hard to pull away from his many hobbies. Or something.

I met a British guy who will be here for another two weeks, and some of his friends. He was pretty cool and we got along very well. We talked largely about accents and comedy; in particular, Dane Cook and Eddie Izzard. He snuck off at some point and I haven't seen him since.

This is Catherine, one of the Swiss girls I mentioned a few posts back. She's in kyuudo, which kind of like archery, but only in that involves both a bow and an arrow. The similarities end there, and I'm not really joking. She works in IT back in her home country and is 24.

Here's a portraiture tip: apparent nose length/size in a picture has very little to do with actual length or size. The key that makes or breaks (ouch.) noses in pictures is whether or not they break the line made by the cheek behind them. You can see her nose is inside her cheek-line (above-right picture), as opposed to breaking it at left.

Surprising difference, isn't it?

Her nose is just fine, by the way.


Well, that wraps up the gala. I think I may have spent more time writing this post than I did actual time there, though.