While on a drive in the mountains of northern Kyoto today, we came across a pretty scene... a small watter-filled field of wilty-looking purple flowers, with a backdrop of the sun setting behind some mountains.

To me they were "wilty-looking purple flowers," but Fumie guessed they were one of three kinds of flowers, each of which turns out to be an iris of some sort when I look up the Japanese names she offered.

The field was apparently filled with frogs, their loud din similar to that mentioned the other day.

The field held a grave marker for [...]

After the ugliness of my last post, now I just want to see some interesting pictures, so here are a few random shots that I've been wanting to share....

These were strawberries that Fumie prepared for the kids when Anthony had some friends over. They lasted for about 30 seconds before the plate was clean. A similar shot was featured on one of my Lightroom posts.

A tree at Anthony's preschool last January. Being in a valley, it seems that Kyoto's sky is always hazy, but on this day it was crisp and deeply blue.

A goat at the petting [...]

It's been just over six months since I released my long writeup on digital image color spaces, and it seems to have been very well received. I appreciate all the wonderful feedback I've gotten about it.

However, I've recently realized that it contained a relatively big mistake. I've corrected it now, but in the original version, I repeated the "conventional wisdom" that most applications on Windows blindly treated color data as being sRGB color data. I called these applications "Color Stubborn."

However, it seems that was wrong. Today I tested IE6, Firefox, and the popular IrfanView image viewer and found [...]
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"I think Lightroom will be to photographers what Photoshop is to photographs." -- Reid Thaler Digital Photography Review forum post May 23, 2007

This excellent quote succinctly clarifies the difference in focus between Lightroom and Photoshop. I only wish I had come up with it!

In between snapping pictures of the great blue heron yesterday, I paused to take a picture of some potted flowers. The result is a deliciously rich set of colors that can't really be replicated properly on the web.

This image is right out Lightroom, with all settings at their default. The saturation may look unnaturally vivid as if it's been boosted in post processing, but believe me, the colors are so rich to start with I worried that something might explode if I touched the saturation. 🙂

I'm wondering how this might be as a desktop background.... Hmmm.....

Also while [...]