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...

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 side....

Now that I think about it, [...]

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 [...]
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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....

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 has a central hub with the helicopter connected by a rod, so that the helicopter can go around and around, and up and down in conjunction with how much power is applied. It actually takes a fair amount of [...]

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...

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....

Later, Anthony and I were playing, and we pretended that I did something bad so that he could be a policeman and "get" me....

Thanks Marci and Marty! The Chef outfit will have to be [...]