Tag: standards

This morning after getting up and having the breakfast things we’d bought last night from a 7-Eleven, my wife and I walked over to the same coffee shop where she’d had a coffee yesterday morning. This time the staff pointed out that I needed to order something if I wanted to sit there with her (which they hadn’t done yesterday!), so I had to get up and go straight to my meetings.

This morning we had technical discussion on: photographic vocabulary and definitions (updating the existing standard), an additional presentation on HDR held over from yesterday, and the ISO DNG format. Following this we moved into the closing administrative session, which was broken in two by lunch.

We broke for lunch by 12:15 and I met up with my wife at our usual spot. I’d searched and found a couple of bakeries that we could walk to and try for lunch: Hattori Bagel, and Espresso Bar – The MARKET. We walked past the bagel place first and went on to check The MARKET. My wife liked the look of the bagel place, but liked The MARKET better. It looked like a boutique bakery with small loaves of interesting grainy bread, biscuits, scones, and things, They had a lunch menu with a few choices of vegetarian dish plus the soup of the day, and also some sandwiches and focaccia, mostly vegetarian but with a couple of tuna/salmon options.

I chose the brown rice quiche and soup, while she grabbed a fig scone and a lemon/tea scone to have with a caffe latte. We sat at a table outside on a small wooden patio, so we could enjoy the quiet street ambience. The soup turned out to be what I think was green split pea. The quiche had chunks of sweet potato and onion in it and was pretty good.

As we were eating it began raining, out of today’s overcast sky. At least the weather is cooler today. We walked back to the Convention Centre in the sparse but heavy drops, where we parted ways again until later in the afternoon.

Back in the meeting, I assisted with drafting of the WG18 resolutions, and then we had the final administrative session for the working group. But that’s not the end of the whole meeting! There were still TC42 sessions later today, and tomorrow.

The WG18 meeting wrapped up by 14:00 and I returned to the hotel to meet my wife again. After a bit of a rest we went out to the giant Aeon shopping mall across the street so I could have a look around, and also to buy a cheap umbrella which may be needed in the next few days as rainy weather is forecast. I also checked out a couple of game and hobby shops to see if they had any interesting things. I found some Japanese Magic: the Gathering cards, but not for the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty expansion, for which I might have considered buying a few. So I saved money but not buying any!

We came back to the hotel and soon after I went back to the Convention Centre for the second administrative working group session. After this I went over to the adjacent Crowne Plaza Hotel to meet my wife there in the lobby before we went to the meeting reception up on the level 19 Sky Lounge. It was a standing buffet with a wide range of food: little fried crumbed things, prawns in a spicy sauce, pieces of steamed fish, chicken pieces in another sauce. There were several vegetarian options including roast vegetables, mini quiches, mini sushi rolls with three different fillings, salads, and some other things. They also had chefs preparing fresh sushi, served six pieces to a small wooden box, and plates of freshly fried tempura with vegetables, prawns, and fish pieces. There were also dainty pieces of three different types of cakes, and cut pieces of various fruits for desserts.

The Japanese organising hosts and the TC 42 chair gave brief welcoming speeches and then we started eating and chatting with various delegates. There was entertainment: firstly singing by the main woman on the local organising committee, then a musical performance by delegates on recorder, trumpet, and clarinet, with same woman and a man I didn’t recognise doing some brief vocals towards the end of an original composition written by the guy playing the recorder. And finally after these there was a pantomime performance with a narrating drummer announcing various things in Japanese, while a dancer dressed as a samurai performed, then two dragons appeared (performed as large puppets by men inside the dragons), leading to a fight in which the samurai cut the dragons’ heads off.

We chatted with various people, and it was good to hear that many are excited to come to Australia again next year when hopefully I will be hosting the WG18 meeting in October 2024. It was a good event, and the view from the Sky Lounge was wonderful, with panoramic windows to the north and south showing off the city of Okayama and the mountains to the north, as the sun went down. The reception was scheduled until 20:00, and in true Japanese fashion the hotel staff announced it was over and ushered everyone out right on time.

We’d had plenty to eat for dinner and so just headed back to the hotel via a 7-Eleven to get some breakfast supplies. Then it was showers and bed time.

I slept a bit better but not fully through the night. We got up at 07:00 and had breakfast in the hotel room with the things we’d bought last night. I had a salmon onigiri and a small set of sushi rolls. My wife had a red bean paste bun, and then tried what she thought was simply some plain type of mini bread rolls, but which turned out to be a “3 flavours” thing with chocolate, custard, and red bean paste in the middle of the mini rolls!

After this we prepared for the day and left around 08:00. My wife walked with me to the coffee shop I found yesterday near the Convention Centre and got a latte there. We parted and I went to the meetings, while she was planning to visit the Okayama Prefectural Museum and Okayamajinja shrine.

The ISO meeting today started with a session on a proposal for measuring the information capacity of camera systems, using Shannon information theory. Then we discussed angle-dependent image flare measurement, followed by depth camera characterisation for accuracy and resolution.

We broke for lunch a little early. I met my wife and we walked north of the Convention Centre to find one of the lunch places recommended by the meeting organisers. We found the place called Sanuki Otoko Udon Nose and were looking at the picture menu board outside, which looked like it had some suitable vegetarian options for her. Then one of the Japanese delegates from my meeting came out and said hello, and asked if we needed any assistance with the Japanese. I asked if there were vegetarian options and he pointed out a few on the menu board outside, so we went in. We all had to wait a few minutes for a table, and my meeting colleague was with two other Japanese delegates, so I reintroduced them to my wife (they probably met briefly last year in Cologne at the beer garden dinner).

A couple of minutes later we were seated at the central bar-like area. The waitress gave us an English menu, and my wife picked a dish of cold udon noodles with kelp and some other vegetables, plus a quail egg. I chose a bowl of hot noodles with tempura prawns and vegetables, which came with a smaller bowl of dipping sauce and a plate of chopped spring onions, sesame seeds, and ginger. My Japanese colleague helped us interpret the waitress, who was asking a couple of questions. He said that the dishes came in three sizes, which he described as 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. We both asked for the 1.0 versions. She also wanted to know if she should bring the cold noodles first, or wait until the other dish was cooked so we could eat together, and we chose the latter.

The meals came and they were both substantial. The quail eggs were raw. My wife mixed hers through the cold noodles with the sauce, while I put mine into my dipping sauce and swirled it around. We filled up quickly and were very glad we’d chosen the 1.0 size! After paying (cash only) the cheap ¥1700 for the meals, I left my wife at the nearby Hokancho shopping street so she could look around there, while I headed back to the meeting.

The next session was about camera autofocus repeatability. And then there was a long session on high dynamic range photo display and gain maps for dynamic range conversion. This included a couple of interesting demos of HDR image conversion and display, using an Apple HDR monitor to show off the images. This was pretty impressive, and hopefully a preview of a near future with easy access to HDR images and good ways of displaying them for people on all sorts of display hardware.

The digital photography working group session ended by 17:00, but I had an extra two hour meeting until 19:00 with the TC 42 Administrative Working Group, which deals with business matters at the higher technical committee level.

After this I left and met up with my wife again. We dropped my bag off at our room and then walked over to Omame-dokoro Masu, a place described by Google as a tofu restaurant. It had good reviews and many people saying it was great for vegetarians. We found what I thought was the place, but it was difficult to tell as there were three doors close to each other, and no English anywhere in sight. We poked our noses in one and I asked the staff inside simply “tofu?” and they nodded, so we entered and took seats at the bar counter. The place was tiny and there were just seven seats, but there was also apparently an upstairs room with other customers up there.

One staff member typed on his phone and then showed us a translation which said, “Sorry the menu is only in Japanese.” We said that was okay, and I used Google’s photo translate on my phone to get an idea of what was on the menu. We ordered the “peanut tofu” appetiser, “special tofu dumplings”, and “assortment of 6 types of fried tofu – sweet and spicy sauce, spicy miso, plum meat, dengaku, grated radish, fried garlic”. I assumed “plum meat” meant the flesh of a plum. I got a beer to drink and M. tried a “Calpis”, which turned out to be a milky yoghurt drink, which she liked. The last dish arrived first, being six blocks of fried tofu topped with the various things. But one looked suspiciously like tiny fish and tasted to me a bit like it, so I asked after looking up the Japanese word for fish, and the guy confirmed it was indeed fish. So I ate that one, but my wife had the dengaku (miso) one and half of each of the others.

Then the dumplings arrived, looking like fried gyoza. I tried one, and the filling was very suspiciously meaty. I asked the guy, who asked another staff member, who said they had chicken in them. So this was a bit surprising! I ate them, and they were good, but my wife was left not having any. We ordered a couple of other things, this time asking to confirm they were fully vegetarian before ordering. So it was a bit of a mixed bag, with unexpected items and surprise meat in dishes. I wonder how many vegetarians have gone to this place and assumed the entire menu was vegetarian, and came away thinking some of the dishes had surprisingly good “imitation meat” in them!

We were full, and walked home along another different route for variety. We stopped in at 7-Eleven for more breakfast supplies and then went back to the hotel for the night. I grabbed a random ice cream which had zebras on the wrapper, and it turned out to be vanilla ice cream with ripply stripes of chocolate through it, and was quite good. So it was really a day of surprising food!

Today was the opening day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I’m here in Okayama for. It’s being held at the Okayama Convention Centre, which is just a few minutes walk from our hotel, on the opposite side of the main train station.

For breakfast we went to a nearby 7-Eleven and picked up some packaged onigiri and a couple of random sweet things and headed back to the hotel room to eat them. After that, I walked the short distance to the Convention Centre, and found the meeting room, where I was early, but the Japanese admin staff had already set up. There were coffee and tea and some simple snacks, including some specialities local to Okayama:

• Kibi-dango – small type of mochi
• Ote-manju – very thin flour based shell filled with adzuki paste
• Yumesen – “waffle” wafers filled with cream, vanilla or matcha

This meeting is a Plenary meeting for all of ISO Technical Committee 42 Photography, which is the umbrella committee for our technical activities in Working Group 18 on digital photography. The whole committee also includes other working groups dealing with photo printing, image stability, storage, and other issues related to physical photography. We only have a plenary meeting once every two years, and in between the separate working groups have their own technical meetings (WG18 meets three times a year). The first part of the meeting this morning was a plenary session, which was essentially administrative business for TC42 as a whole. It was also the first chance for the new chair of TC42 to lead a face-to-face plenary meeting after the 2021 meeting was replaced by a fully virtual meeting due to COVID.

After that plenary session we had the opening session of the WG18 meeting, again more administrative stuff. The main thing for me was discussion and planning of the meeting scheduled for Sydney in October 2024. We needed to decide on the dates, bearing in mind things like technical conferences that some members may be attending around the same time of the year, so there are no travel clashes. We decided on the week of 14-18 October, 2024.

During the lunch break I went by myself to a curry house not far away and had a Japanese curry with vegetables and a fried pork cutlet.

After lunch we had the first technical session. This discussed work on standards related to low light camera performance with simulation of human hand shake (i.e. not using a tripod), the memory model used for storage of digital images by cameras, and definitions of camera pixel-related specifications (like exactly what a megapixel is and how to count them for camera sensors). These sessions took us through to the close for the day, which finished a half hour early, at 16:30.

After the meeting I returned to the hotel and met my wife (who actually came out to meet me halfway) and then a little later we went out for dinner. I wanted to try an okonomiyaki place that I’d found with reviews saying they did a good vegetarian version. It was just around the corner from CBD Green where we had dinner last night, and in fact we’d walked around to have a look at it then. It was a little hard to tell which place it was, as there was no English signage at all, but it looked popular with a queue of people waiting for tables. So we went a bit early tonight to hopefully beat the queues.

When we got there, the place only had two tables occupied out of about ten, so we were seated and they turned the hotplate in the middle of our table on to heat up. The waitress apologised that they didn’t have menus in English. I said we wanted okonomiyaki and my wife was vegetarian, and she said that was okay. She went down a list of options, pointing at the lines on the Japanese menu: beef, pork, prawns, squid, mix, and also the same again with noodles. We opted for the noodle-free versions, I got the mix and my wife the vegetarian. We were looking forward to cooking them ourselves on the hotplate, but we noticed a guy cooking things on a bigger hotplate at the kitchen/bar area. One set of cooked noodles came out for one of the other tables and they put it on their hotplate and turned it down to just keep it hot. Then soon after they brought our already cooked okonomiyaki over and did the same.

Oh well. We still got to add our own sauce and mayonnaise and kelp flakes, and bonito shavings on mine. And it was really good. Although they were a little on the small side compared to other places where I’ve had okonomiyaki before. But they were very inexpensive. The whole meal, plus a glass of beer for me came to only ¥21,000, or about A$21.

We explored a little further down the street where the restaurant was, as it looked interesting, with dozens of other small restaurants lining the sides. Then we walked back to the station, where earlier we’d seen a take-away crepe place, with a queue of people waiting to order. I fancied one of those for dessert to make the total dinner more substantial. When we got there, there was still a long queue, and I realised why when I saw a sign that indicated that the place was having a one-day sale, and all crepes were only ¥390. In fact, the queue was even longer than it looked, because we saw a young couple try to join on the end, only to be escorted by a staff member outside the food hall area, to an additional roped off queuing area out in the main station concourse, where more customers were already waiting! So… we decided not to bother queuing up for crepes, and I got a Belgian waffle from another place nearby, a peach and strawberry one. It was very good – crisp crust, chewy interior, and good strawberry flavour in the waffle itself, topped with a peach cream.

Back in the hotel we showered and prepared for another earlyish night, with hopefully a solid sleep for myself this time.