(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 [...]
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(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 [...]
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Crisp 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 [...]
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Lighting a scene to photograph in a pleasing way is either a matter of luck, or the combination of two skills: knowing the physics of light (that is, knowing the results you'll get from lighting decisions), and having the creative sense to use that knowledge toward an aesthetically-pleasing end.
For my part, I generally go with the “luck” option, but that's about to change.
I've recently started reading  Light — Science & Magic:  An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, and the first chapters have made me positively giddy with expectation.

As I lamented once before, good photographers apparently make bad writers (with the most poorly written book [...]
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(IMAGE: Part of a Japanese 2,000-yen Banknoteat 650× Magnification)
Well, I'm not sure “650× magnification” is exactly the right way to say it because there are so many ways to lie with numbers. The area of the bill shown is about 8mm by 5.3mm, or about 0.066 square inches. With an average LCD display at 86 DPI, the image above appears at about 8 × 5.4 inches, or about 43 square inches (although how big it appears for you depends on the physical size of your monitor, your monitor's dot pitch, your desktop size, and perhaps some browser settings).
So, from the actual area of [...]
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In the park with Anthony today, I brushed up against a plant that left my arm plastered with seed pods that apparently became molecularly bonded to my shirt and skin. They were exceedingly difficult to remove. When I was actually able to pry one away, it stuck just as well to my fingers. I could feel it grabbing onto my fingerprints.
If I could then somehow flick it with enough force to propel it away from my finger, it would generally manage to land on my pant leg, which started the whole process over.
I'm not sure I've totally eradicated them from my skin/clothes, but [...]
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(IMAGE: Water #1a)
(IMAGE: Water #1b)
(IMAGE: Water #2a)
(IMAGE: Water #2b)
I've long known the old adage "if it's out of the frame (or can be cropped out), it doesn't exist." Well, at least I've known the concept – the photographic equivalent of “out of sight, out of mind” – and so if they aren't an adage, they should be.
As I mentioned in one of my Kyoto fall-color previews a couple of weeks ago, that's one of the great challenges in photographing much of the beauty in Kyoto: to not photograph what is not beautiful that often intrudes into an otherwise photogenic scene [...]
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(IMAGE: Silk Shirt: an old Kimono Reborn)
I tried my hand at product photography for the first time today, for a Kyoto charity that takes the wonderful silk fabrics from old kimonos and turns them into stylish garments. Ladies in small, rural villages in various south-east Asian countries (Laos, Cambodia, etc.) who have been trained by the charity actually do the sewing, by hand or on pedal-powered sewing-machines provided by the charity. The whole point is to provide people in these small villages a way to earn a living without having to leave their village/family behind.
The charity's name is “Reborn”, which I'd guess refers both [...]
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(IMAGE: Dark)
While taking long exposure night shots of Itsukushima Shrine's Gate in Miyajima, the brilliant illumination was turned off, and the area became quite dark. I thought I'd give it a try with the lights off, but as you can see above, my one attempt came out completely dark. Since it was late, I didn't want to spend the time trying again for a more reasonable exposure, so we packed up and returned to the hotel.
When I got home and loaded all the images into Lightroom, I intended to delete this one along with all the other rejects. More out of habit than anything [...]
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Nikon is hosting a series of hands-on preview events across Japan for its recently-announced D3 and D300 cameras. Today, Zak and Shimada-san joined me for a trip to attend the event in Osaka, which started today and runs through the weekend.
I thought it'd be nice to head down in style, so after some excellent ramen on the 10th floor of Kyoto Station, we took the fastest class of bullet train (Nozomi #17) which made the trip in just 14 minutes, hitting 253 km/h (157mph), according to my GPS unit. I thought the maximum speed would be faster (the new maglev trains being tested can go well over [...]
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In Part One about the Sports Day at Anthony's Preschool, I covered events one through five. This post picks up with Event #6.
Event #6: That's The Way To Do It, Team Purpleそれいけ　むらさきぐみ
This was the “obstacle course” for the oldest kids, whose name badges are purple, and hence they're known as the purple class (although as I explained in the previous post, the oldest kids wore either purple or orange shirts for the event).
It started with a short run to a set of hoops that they have to step/jump over....

... then a short run to a tarp that they [...]
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I've just pushed a major new version of my Photoshop calendar-template-building script, which creates the components of a calendar as a many-layered PhotoShop document, that can then be changed and tweaked, have photos added, etc.
The version history shows lots of new things since the previous version: Can now create calendars in 58 languages. Added ability to display week numbers. Added ability to change annotation font name/size/color/opacity. Added ability to force linebreaks in annotation text. Added import/include/<context> support to annotation file. Annotation filename specifications with “YYYY” auto-convert to the calendar's target year. Can now include the year in an annotation's date, and have that entry be safely ignored for [...]
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