Miyako Odori
 

Had a tea ceremony just before the actual play, my first encounter with real geiko.

A MAN I ASSUME......????

mmm... no.

No men in that profession.

nevermind...

i thought geiko was the insurance company...isn't it geisha? (i could be culturally inept)

GEICO (guy-co) is the insurance company. Geisha (gay-sha) are the female Japanese entertainers....

I've got sme bad news: you have been sold into slavery and will have to be a prostitute for the rest of your life. There is good news though, I just saved 10% on my car insurance by switching to geico.

Edit: I know that Geiko is the term for geisha in Kyoto, and geisha aren't prostitutes. I was taking a tease and running with it. The photograph is beautiful, and shows as much the skill of the photographer as it does the beaufy and grace of the subject.

Geiko is the term for geisha in Kyoto.

And geisha aren't prostitutes.

Geisha are certainly not prostitutes these days, as much as they are tourist attractions and corporate entertainers, and technically speaking they weren't prostitutes in the old days either... but they were entertainers, and every now and then they might have sort of accidentally had sex with one of their better tipping customers, and I'm sure they expected to be raped from time to time by that drunk samurai who won't take no for an answer. The assigned prestige of the geisha doesn't cover up the fact that they were generally sold into the lifestyle and were expected to work for a certain period of time whether they wanted to or not, and were largely exploited by men with money, whether or not that involved sex (which it did, even if that wasn't their main function).

And on another note, there were actually male geisha at one point, hence the word sha at the end, which means person. I'm not familiar with the details, because the male geisha didn't seem to make it to the point in history that geisha women became an icon in Japanese culture.

Anyway, I guess this has gotten kind of OT, it is a great picture and I've never actually seen one closeup either. Kimonos rock, I need to get one.

Very nice focus, Sty, but I think the crop is a bit too tight on the geisha's left side as well at the bottom. Don't care for how the bow (I imagine there is more of a PC name for that part of her kimono) on the back of her kimono is pretty much totally cropped out and how her left elbow is nearly cropped, too. I think the photo would have been much nicer if we could have seen her hands holding the bowl, also.

OT: There were plenty of real prostitutes back then and now, for high and low class. The profession (which they were sold or bought) didn't involve sex per se, but you can imagine that since quite a lot of them get married after their career (or end their career when getting pregnant), there was some voluntary copulating going on :). As far as I've understood, this has been more like 'after work' and didn't involve money at all.

Also I wouldn't instantly call all the girls in that profession prostitutes if some patron would offer huge amount of money for some after-hours fun, more likely they put this money to their own pockets and the tea house had no idea about it.

Yeah, I would have wanted to get those features also.

Too bad the situation was extremely restricted and I was lucky to get into position to have anything from her mid-body at all. The table you see on the left side was so crammed you couldn't see but her head and movements in the room were restricted.

I have maybe one more which show her assistant maiko also, I'll try to get that here too. I was able to snap it at the end of the session when we were allowed to move a bit more freely.

I'm also experimenting with this beta version of Adobe Lightroom... I'm not yet quite skilled in that and the new controls seem to take quite a lot of thinking to be applied correctly... but damn it's nice piece of software.

Genji's wife

A much nicer photo. Did you shoot it with available light or did you use a flash? What lens did you use?

Brilliant photo. She looks really freaky to me though >.<

Available light, she was on the spotlight though.

Increased luminance on both highlight and shadows, a little bit of exposure & blacks tweaking. Ah the tone curve rocks in Lightroom. Much better than curves in Photoshop.

1/1000, f2.8, iso800, 1D.

70-200L IS USM @ 200mm

Later, I need to do some noise reduction and sharpening. I'm definetly printing this.

I thought this was the actors that dress like women???...sorry,I was misinformed

Ah yes that's Kabuki theater. You *can* tell the difference though :)

Don't you just love that lens? It's a sweet lens and I'm very partial to mine.
:cool: