Basking in Akazawa

Its FALL and what can be worst if one doesnt spend time with those wonderful colors. So not to disappoint outselves we planned to go to "Akazawa", some 70Kms away from my home. "Aka" in japanese is "Red", so is this place all RED in Fall ??
I with my good old company Anand and Priya set out on a drive to find out.We crisscrossed the kiso valley river to reach Akazawa, the autumn leaves were just stunning. The river added its share of beauty to the scene.



But what drew my attention was not those colors but groups of Japanese photographers with their tripods, said to myself well I have some company.
[ As I was aware that there are 2-3 blotches on my camera CCD,and wanted to get rid of them but lack the guts. Last night out of the blue I opened it and started cleaning the mirror and some how messed it up with lense cleaning lotion, only to realize in the morning that the mirror looked really bad now. I fiddled with it for awhile to find that the focus is not working so called my camera 911 service "Ashok" {thanks for yahooBB to give me Japan to US calls at such low prices}, well all I needed to do was to unlock the Focus Lock button on his advise. Anyway tomorrow I will send it to Nikon Service Center, I have some complaints with the lense too.]
Once we reached the place we had good number of courses to choose from. We took the one along the river and moved up. We basked in natures splendid colors.
I started off with my D70 once more, but today doesnt seem to be my day, as every shot I tried missed the target somewhy or the other, may be I was not able to concentrate as I came to know yesterday that my aunt passed away. All that comes before my mind is she getting married to my Mamayya and then after 22+yrs of happy married life my mama and his two sons withering the rough. I was trying to get out of this pensive mood.

I failed to capture even a text book shot.I just wanted to walk home rightoff, but waited for Anand and Priya. It was a sleepy drive back. I was sitting next to anand who was at the wheel and Zzzing off. I hardly slept last night. When we reached home Anand remarked "Do you know when a driver feels sick on a long drive ?" yaa. I know that "when all the passengers along with the one next to are sound asleep".Very much I remember even Sudhakar used to complain the same back in india esp when I sit next to him on long drives.
Why dont these guys take it the other way "That ppl feel so comfortable when they drive that they fall asleep..!!"

On a whole todays Photo shoot was a mess. Back home when I was reviewing the snaps , I wanted to enhance the snaps in some way or the other.Offlate I was reading a chapter about Color. So wanted to experiment with HSI color model.Try to saturate so that it looks more pleasing.
Today I set the D70 to output NEF and JPG files on every shot. Color mode of Adobe RGB. I opened in Adobe Photoshop CS (I didnt buy it its trialware, wish someone presents me this ~US$800, oh fairy godmother why dont you!!). The saturations of the DSC_1429.NEF and DSC_1429.JPG are different though they are from the same shot and ( both encoded in Adobe RGB mode ?? ). Well thats the point in question ??

A. Color space management is really getting on my nerves.
B. Managing the growing digital content... guess I need to evolve a digital work flow,else i will end up spending hours trying to organize.

Well finally here is one snap which looked better off when I saturated it by 20% else it will look like the DSC_1430.NEF.