Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine (and many shrines around Japan). I've written about the overall festival earlier, such as "Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons" nine years ago, and "Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits" five years ago.

Today I went only to watch the final bonfire event. I explain it in some detail in "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine" from nine years ago, and so like this post from five years ago, this time are just some photos.

I wandered over to the shrine about half an hour before the [...]

Rob Cole used to be one of the more prolific engineers creating plugins for Adobe Lightroom, until two years ago when he seemed to have fallen off the face of the Internet. His web site vanished, taking with it his valuable trove of solutions for photographers, and at the same time, his active participation in online forums stopped.

For the past two years no one in this facet of his life knew what had happened, but I've finally learned today that Rob passed away unexpectedly in January 2015.

This situation brings to mind "On the Permanence of One’s Online (and [...]

This picture is from the same snowy outing almost two years ago that produced the three-part "Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow" posts (part 1 - part 2 - part 3). This shot mimics the one that leads Part 2, but this one was taken five hours later (at 4:42am) after the snow had long stopped falling.

Anyway, it's just a random photo to accompany a recommendation for users of Adobe Lightroom to read Victoria Bampton's "Lightroom Catalogs – Top 10 Misunderstandings" article. New users may find some misconceptions cleared up, while veterans will find a good resource to [...]

Today is the nine-year anniversary of my plugins for Adobe Lightroom. It was on November 16, 2007 that I released my first ones, export plugins for Zenfolio and for SmugMug.

Now, nine years later, after many having been added and a few having been retired, I have about 45 plugins available.

Today I released a few minor updates, including a new "Publish At..." feature of my Bag-o-Goodies plugin. It lets you schedule a publish operation for later in the evening.

I lost track of the count of updates I made prior to Lightroom 2, but since then, considering only the [...]

Lightroom allows for a variety of metadata for each photo or video... capture date, caption, keywords, etc., and plugins can add further, custom fields, but sometimes what's offered by Lightroom or existing plugins just doesn't fulfill one's own specific needs. Luckily, it's actually fairly easy to make your very own Lightroom plugin to add your own metadata fields. In this post, I'll show you how.

It's fairly quick and simple. It will take far longer to read this post about how to do it than it takes to actually do it.

The kind of fields we can add this way [...]