This xkcd comic came out today with perfect timing:

Last month I was contacted by GearBest and asked whether I'd like to do a review of a product from their cycling gear or LED lights categories; I'd get to keep the product in exchange for an unbiased review. Probably they'd seen my headphone review done under similar circumstances. I get this kind of message every so often and don't usually accept, but a bicycle light piqued my interest.

I chose to try out a small, $50 head-mounted light that I thought might be useful for nighttime riding:

The flashlight easily [...]

Just an FYI announcement to Lightroom folks, as of version 20151010.134, my Metadata Wrangler plugin now allows you to add/overwrite certain metadata fields like Title and Caption. Previously, it could merely remove metadata that was already there.

My publish/export plugins generally give a lot of control in how those fields are populated during export, but most other plugins do not, nor do Lightroom's built-in export methods, so those users may appreciate being able to craft their metadata. Through the template tokens that my plugins support, you have access to the breadth of data about the image from your Lightroom catalog, [...]

昨日サイクリングをして大阪へ行きました。途中で金光万石さんの写真を撮ったけれども、カメラの設定のミスのせいでかなり露出過度にしまった。 写真は良くなかったが、ソフトで調整してから上の結果を出せました。結果は本人と同じ位格好良いだと思います。

Out on a cycle ride to Osaka yesterday, I snapped a photo of cycling buddy Manseki Kanemitsu as we rode. The photo was wildly overexposed due to a camera-settings mistake on my part, but with some futzing in Lightroom I made something of it that I like.

I was using the new Panasonic LX100 that I wrote about the other day, but trying it in a different mode where I control both the shutter speed and aperture, and let the camera adjust the image-sensor sensitivity to suit the specific brightness of the moment. In this case I wanted [...]

As I posted the other day, I've got a new camera to use while cycling, a Panasonic LX100. I used it on yesterday's 140km mountain ride, but couldn't use the viewfinder because the viewfinder focus (the "diopter control") stopped working, and the view via the viewfinder was completely fuzzy (including the information displays that should be sharp and clear even if the image through the lens is not yet focused).

A search on the web quickly showed that this was a common problem sometimes fixed by fiddling with the diopter dial, but usually resulting in a return or a replacement [...]

Paul Barr at the Toji-in Temple (等持院) in Kyoto, Japan, in photos taken by two different cameras (whose names are included in the data under each photo).

最近小さいカメラ(パナソニックLX100)を買いました、サイクリングをする時に使うと思います。 僕の普通のカメラ(大きいなニコンのD4)と比べると質はどうでしょうか。京都市の等持院でテストをしました、同時二つのカメラを使って、だいたい同じ写真二枚を撮った。結局LX100は結構良かった。この記事の写真の下にカメラ名が付いている。

When I started cycling earlier in the year, I brought along my big Nikon D4, carried slung across my back like this so that I'd have it ready to shoot when I wanted (like this).

It's a heavy camera to carry, especially on steep uphill mountain rides, but I like the quality of photograph that it allows me to get. I don't think I'd be able to get these kinds [...]