Archive for December, 2007Crisp and Clear, Blazing Sunshine Every day this week I've really enjoyed each morning's trip to drop Anthony off at school, as the cornucopia of rich colors along the way are mentally enriching, spiritually uplifting. They give me yet another reason to count my blessings to be able to live where I do. And this, mind you, is while it's been a depressingly overcast and hazy week. So, consider what it was like in the brilliant and crisp sunshine that greeted Kyoto today. It was simply glorious. Words or pictures can never do it justice. Today was the epitome of a perfect autumn day at [...] 
View full post » From The Elements of Typographic Style (third edition): “ In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn.”— page 17 For the four-and-a-half hours in the bullet train on my trip to see a friend the other day, I brought with me this excellent book by Robert Bringhurst. When most people read a book (or a sign or the classifieds or a menu or...) they don't give even the slightest thought to the typography – the shapes of letters and punctuation, and their layout [...] 
View full post » I love my Nikon D200, but yesterday added a new woe to the “Dead Battery Syndrome” I experienced a couple of months ago: “Black Frame Syndrome” Yesterday, Kyoto was a cold and heavily overcast, with sporadic misty rain. Occasionally and all too briefly, the sun would poke out in brilliant fashion to set the foliage momentarily on fire, so on the way back from picking up Anthony at preschool, I stopped by the grounds of the old imperial palace, now mostly a big park heavily laden with fall colors at their peak. The trees were amazing, but it was dark and dull, so it wasn't too interesting [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: A “Hurry Up So I Can Play” Pose) As I noted yesterday, I was at a park on the grounds of Kyoto's old imperial palace with Anthony the other day. I haven't featured the little man in a while, so I thought I'd share a few pictures... (IMAGE: Heading In) (IMAGE: Being a Kid) (IMAGE: Checking Out the New Toddler Playground) (IMAGE: Must... Make... Leaves... Into.... Pile) (IMAGE: Have Stick, Will Poke) (IMAGE: Crop Circles) (IMAGE: Anthony vs. Cherry Tree) 
View full post » One of the tallest buildings around here is the 38-story “Otsu Mary” building in Otsu City, Japan, over the small mountains to Kyoto's east. Zak lives near there, so I've seen it from outside many times, but got a chance to go inside today while accompanying him and his family to a small dinner gathering. Here's a picture I happened to have taken earlier in the fall from the aforementioned mountains that shows the six-year-old building... (IMAGE: 38-Story “Otsu Mary”) The dinner was on the 27th floor, so I thought we'd be treated to some nice views, but the big surprise was to find [...] 
View full post » I think it's about that time of year for an “Elf Yourself” post. Elf Yourself is a cute little holiday thing kindly made available by OfficeMax, where you upload a picture of yourself, mark where in the picture your face is, and then you see yourself as an elf doing a silly dance to some Christmas music. For example, here's a link to my brother and his family (pictured above) dancing like drunken elves. It's all quite silly, and it's really nice of OfficeMax to have made it. But their “Terms of Use”, which were egregiously ridiculous last year, have crossed into.... well... I'm [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Chinese Cabbage in Fumie's Kitchen) While Fumie was cooking dinner the other day, the proportions of a Chinese cabbage (hakusai – 白菜) in the kitchen caught my eye. I thought it was beautiful, so wanted to try my hand at photographing it. The difficulty in many aspects of photography – as in life – is knowing first what you want to accomplish, and then how to go about it. Unlike my earlier water-glass shots where I just copied someone else's setup, in this case, I had an immediate gut instinct about what I wanted to do, and, especially after having read Light — Science [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Japanese Banknote at 35 × Magnification) A couple of months ago I posted about basics of reverse-lens Macro photography, where I showed some items photographed with some magnification that is considered fairly extreme by macro-photography standards. I threw around “true but misleading” big numbers like “45,000 ×” in jest, but in the normal nomenclature of macro photography where magnification is represented by the relative size of the object to its projection on the film or digital sensor, the photographs in that post were just a bit less than 3 × magnification. Pretty strong stuff. I later posted an example at 5 × magnification, making the edge [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Heading Home)four and a half minutes after sunset Kyoto had some wonderful sunsets last month. The picture above is a crop from a shot I took from the top (fifth) floor of my building just after sunset. It doesn't look much different than the original frame, except for the size of the birds. Here's the uncropped frame... I'd used my 200mm zoom to try to isolate the orange, and just got lucky with the birds. A couple of minutes prior, I was using my wide-angle lens and got some of the blah cityscape in there, as well as an airplane far above.... 
View full post » (IMAGE: Mountains of Oyster Shells) A year ago we took a short trip to the Ise Peninsula, an area of Japan famous for its seafood in a country that has great seafood everywhere. In a previous post, I wrote at length about the food at our ryokan during that trip. While on a drive around the area, we were in the middle of nowhere well off the beaten path when we came upon a huge mountain range of oyster shells. (IMAGE: 100,000,000 Shells)(my guess, accurate, probably, to within several orders of magnitude) (IMAGE: Lots and Lots of This) (IMAGE: They All Look Alike to [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Port of Takamatsu)30 Minutes Before Sunrise Fumie and I made an overnight trip to the city of Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture, on the large island of Shikoku, Japan, to see pop singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介) in concert. Just as I did the last time we made an overnight trip (which was also to see Kousuke Atari in concert, at a shrine in Miyajima), I awoke early to see what photo opportunities there might be in the early of morning. Unlike Miyajima and our extended time there, which produced so many nice (or story-telling) pictures that I had to make a Miyajima category on my blog, we [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Mizuki and Anthony)Drawing by Anthony (five years two months) (used without permission, but if he sues me, I'll put him to bed without supper) Anthony drew the picture above as a present for one of the girls in his class, Mizuki-chan. She came over for a visit on Friday and forgot one of her toys, so he's including the drawing along with the toy when he returns it to her tomorrow. He drew the picture below last week, at my request for a drawing that we could include on our Christmas / New Year's cards. I didn't request any specific content, but he [...] 
View full post » Adding to my stable of export plugins for Lightroom (Zenfolio, Smugmug and Flickr), I've just released my "Export to Picasa Web" Plugin for Lightroom. I just hacked it out and it's received minimal testing by me (and no testing by anyone else), so version churn is likely at first as bugs are reported and shaken out. It comes with a French translation for all the parts that are the same as the other plugins, but the texts unique to this plugin remain in English until the French translator is able to send an update. (If you're one of the unlucky few to get the dreaded [...] View full post » I've been meaning to write about and recommend the 16" FotoSharp Camera Rain Cover I picked up last summer. It's a remarkably simple little cover that scrunches up into a tiny ball in my camera bag when not in use, yet provides rain protection even with my big Nikkor 70-200 VR zoom on my D200. The pictures on its web site pretty much show what it is, especially the 3rd one that shows it laid out flat (on top of a book, to show its transparency). It's a tube with a smallish opening on one end that goes over the lens, and a big opening on the [...] View full post » Copying an Example · By Himself This week, Anthony had shown a sudden (but still slight) interest in writing. The other day he wrote his name in Japanese all by himself, so yesterday, I thought I'd see whether he was interested in learning to write it in English. I wrote a sample, and he copied it a few times (the left of the image above), and then we covered all the examples and he gave it a try by himself. Then we got out a much larger piece of paper, and tried a few more, adding his last name to the mix... More Practice Finally, a bit [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Seen Better Times) I noticed a tiny old house being demolished nearby the other day, and stopped in for a look. It could be anywhere from 40 to 100+ years old... the guys tearing it down didn't know, but it was built at a time when Japanese homes were still built with mud and bamboo for the walls. There are still plenty of this kind of construction in Kyoto. Often, the outside of such walls are veneered in wood, as seen in my Randomly Photographed Stroll in Kyoto and Old Wood-Veneer Siding (Desktop Background) posts. (IMAGE: Half-Exposed Bamboo Lattice) The shot above shows rough-hewn [...] 
View full post » When viewing a geoencoded photo – one where the location's latitude and longitude are encoded in the metadata – in Lightroom, its coordinates are displayed in the metadata panel as shown below: GPS Coordinates in Lightroom's Metadata Viewer (Well, it shows up if you're using a metadata-panel view that includes the coordinates among the items to be shown, such as “all”, but you can also use my Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder to build a customized metadata-panel view.) Clicking on the little arrow to the right of the coordinates brings up your web browser, with the location showing in Google Maps. In the case of the [...] 
View full post » Efficient Use of Land Driving today on a road in Kyoto today that I've driven many times in the past (the road I reddened above, traveling from the upper right to the lower left), I was surprised to notice for the first time that there's a building right in the middle of an interchange cloverleaf. Quite efficient, if not a bit unpleasant for the occupants of the building. 
View full post » As we have done in the past, we started our Christmas by taking in the free Christmas-Eve concert in the lobby of the Kyoto Hotel Okura, our fourth year in a row (having done it in 2006, 2005, and 2004). Fumie's dad is in Malaysia at the moment, so her mom joined us as well. Prior to the concert, the hotel passes out free champaign and juice.... (IMAGE: Sharp-Dressed Elf) Then there's the concert. This time was a very nice choir of about 50 kids, but unfortunately, they brought their families so even though we got there very early, there wasn't a chair to [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Yeah!) “ Thank You! This is what I always wanted; I love it, I love it............ what is it? ” The picture above of Anthony ripping the packaging from a present pretty much sums up the day, but our Christmas started a month ago when we set up our Christmas tree. (IMAGE: Helping with the Tree) When I was growing up in Ohio, we had a real, perfectly-shaped, wonderfully-smelling, live evergreen tree every Christmas. We always got scratched up when decorating it, and the needles would eventually get shed to the floor only to eventually find their way in a most painful manner [...] 
View full post » Yesterday during our Christmas, the first present Anthony opened set a pattern that we saw repeated fairly often, one quite different than the wide-eyed wonder of a year ago... (IMAGE: Wrapping Off, but Still Unsure) (IMAGE: Recognition Starting to Set In) (IMAGE: “Houston, We Have a Toy!”) (of some sort — at this point he still doesn't actually know what it is) He brought it to Mommy, asked what it was, and was thrilled to find out that his Aunt Marci and Uncle Marty had sent him two uniforms, one for a policeman and another for a chef.... (IMAGE: Trying on the Policeman's Hat) (IMAGE: Lokin' [...] 
View full post » As I mentioned yesterday, five-year-old Anthony's first present unwrapping set a pattern that we saw a number of times throughout the morning.... (IMAGE: Opening the Present from Obaachan (Fumie's Mom)) Some books he really likes, and some silly socks. (IMAGE: Opening the Present from Mommy and Daddy) Some accessories for the train set he got on his last birthday. (IMAGE: Opening the Present from Grandma and Grandpa) For whatever reason, the present from Grandma and Grandpa generated a powerful pose instead. I don't think he really knew what it was, but the picture of a helicopter was likely sufficient to trigger the celebration. The helicopter thing [...] 
View full post » (IMAGE: Before) (IMAGE: Bringing in the Frame) (IMAGE: Measure Twice, Install Once) (IMAGE: Silly Dance In Front of the Tripod) (IMAGE: Silly Dance #2) (IMAGE: Frame is Done) (IMAGE: Lighting Assistant) (IMAGE: Installing the Mirror) (IMAGE: Ensuring Adhesion) (IMAGE: Their Work Reflects Well on Them) 
View full post »
(IMAGE: My Sensor Dust Reference Page)
In a recent post about silly extreme macro photography, I commented that some of the small-aperture f/22 shots weren't good for much except illustrating that I need to clean my image sensor. Just as a small light source like a flashlight casts a sharper shadow than, say, a large light source like a picture window, a small aperture lens setting highlights any dust on the camera's sensor by allowing it to cast a sharper shadow on the sensor's photosites, yielding noticeable spots in the resulting picture. Some of my silly macro shots had blotchy dust spots on them. I clean my D200 [...] View full post » (IMAGE: Red Berries of Some Sort) Winter is fairly blah in Kyoto, color/nature-wise. Kyoto is glorious in autumn and glorious during cherry-blossom season, hellatiously hot and humid in summer, and blah in winter. But one thing it has in winter are red berries of all sorts. While walking back from the shrine-closing ceremony in mid-November, I noticed some berries growing wild by a small river... (IMAGE: Red Berries of Some Sort) Since then, I've started to see them all over, whether in small plants, on shrubs, or in trees. Here's an old house fronting the river, with large bushes of red berries flanking on either [...] 
View full post » | 
Jeffrey Friedl You are currently browsing the archives for December, 2007. Blog Basics Index of Photos Post Categories Currently Popular(Not counting recent posts)
(Popular six months ago)
(Most popular posts, ever)
|