Calligraphy Brushes and Combinations

I went to a calligraphy class today* and talked to the teacher for a while afterward since he let everyone out early. We talked about various paper sizes, various weights of paper, and the different things you call some quantities of paper. I was kind of surprised he didn't have any business cards on him.

Apparently, he gets a paper the size of the classroom and uses a brush that could very well be a broom to write out a massive... thing. I don't know what he does with these things. I mean, we're not talking a small classroom, in case you're wondering. Figure... 30' x 40' or so. It's about $200 worth of paper. Yes, he stands on it to write and, yes, he has to walk around to write individual strokes.

He had some of his brushes with him, and he let me take a picture of them. Well, about 20 pictures, actually. Today's pictures were an exercise in photography and photo manipulation more than anything else, because I'm sure most of you know roughly how I feel about calligraphy.

First up is an overhead view of all of them. The one on the right is made from horse hair, though I don't know if it's tail or mane or of there are very fluffy horses, or if they pick their ears, or what.
The next one to left is made from sheep hair, and the next one from tanuki, which is something like a hybrid between a dog and a raccoon. I was going to link the Wikipedia article, but I can't access any of the Wikipedia servers right now, strangely enough. Anyway, there's quite a bit of folklore about them, apparently, and then there's the actual animal.
So what I did to this picture is fairly limited. I corrected the horrible distortion using my 18-55mm at its wide end creates, and I think I changed the colors slightly.

This one was just gratuitous and really didn't need to be included, but I had two similar shots, so I thought I would see about combining them. I've carefully exported this at the same low resoluation as everything else, so it's hard to see the weird misalignment. Apparently, I can't kep the camera perfectly still while handheld. Imagine that! It's one with the flash on, and one with it off and a longer exposure.
Anyway, don't do this, and if you do, be steadier than I am. Or use a tripod, like someone smart would.

Last is a dramatic (in as much as a pile of inanimate hair can be dramatic) shot of the brushes. I took a few pictures, doing my best to keep it lined up by using two scene elements and my viewfinder. I focused each one on a different brush, and then I picked the two that had the most of them in focus and combined them by hand.

The next version of Photoshop will do this for you automatically. And it only costs $800! You can even trigger this kind of stuff from inside of Lightroom, if you've spent a further $300 on that. It's probably worth it for people who do this kind of stuff a lot, but this is the first time I've done it and I don't see myself doing it a lot in the future.

Anyway, I like this picture the best.
...

DRAMA!