Australian/Japanese friends of mine, Peter and Tomoko, had their third child baptized at mass today. Mariko Theresa was 12 days old at the time, although she has aged an additional 4% in the half day since. 🙂

Their oldest, Joseph, is just three months older than Anthony, so they enjoy playing together. We normally have lunch together after mass, and often go to a playground together after that. Their second child is two-year-old Kyoko.

12-day-old Mariko was, of course, just cute enough to eat (although she's so tiny you'd need to go back for seconds). She slept the whole time, [...]

Peter requested some fern pictures. I happen to have a few poorly-photographed fern pictures in my library, so here they are....

The next three fuzzy shots were taken in the dark shade under deep forest cover, handheld, while on a short hike in the hills with Anthony last May. I've got a monopod on order now, which hopefully should make this kind of situation easier to photograph, but in any case, here are the shots I did get:

The next picture is sad. I took it when we stopped in the mountains in the middle of nowhere to eat our [...]

Here are a few more shots from Kyoto's Giouji Temple (祇王寺), to add to the other posts in the set (linked via the "related posts" box below).

I love how the "do not enter" gate uses a piece of bamboo set into notched pillars of granite. A classy touch.

Continuing with the story about last fall's hike up Kyoto's Mt. Daimonji and the ensuing silly lunch on top, here are some hazy views from the top. Kyoto is usually fairly hazy, so when it is nice and clear, I'm tempted to make the hike back up there for better pictures.

These two shots were taken at either end of my Nikkor 70-200/2.8 zoom's range, with the one below showing this area (mouseover here) in the one above.

Below, some notable sites include the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (seen earlier in this post), the Main Gate of the [...]

So, picking up where I left off at the end of my post the other day about last fall's Daimonji Hike, we were at the top of the (short) mountain and sat down for lunch.

At one point, Anthony and Kana-chan sat quietly eating lunch....

The functional part of the sentence above is "one point," because at all other points they were being crazy and silly, as this pair are known for.

It went on and on.

I was giving my relatively-new Nikkor 70-200/2.8 a try, prior to getting its autofocus repaired, using it manually. One of the shots was [...]