This is the same area whose blossoms were featured in last week's It Has Begun and this week's Sakura from my Kitchen Window. Digging around in my blog archives a bit, from 2006 I find Long Night Exposures and Cherry Blossoms and Cherry Blossom Finale, and even a few from 2005 before I moved here: Indeed, the Blooms have Bloomed in Kyoto and Poetry for the Season and More Cherry-Blossom Pics.

It's a pretty area, but photos would look much nicer without the cinderblock wall in the background (a wall one doesn't really notice until you look through the viewfinder).

Despite having a cold during our vacation last week to Amami (a southern Japanese island in the East China Sea), I somehow found the energy to take a few pictures. 🙂

I'm busy now with other things lately (have you done your taxes yet?) so I haven't had time to go through our photos from the trip, so here are a few from the beginning, of Anthony playing on the beach in front of the hotel.

There was a bright overcast with only the occasional bit of sun peaking through, so there wasn't much color in the water.

Our hotel [...]

I don't want to leave the negativity of the previous post on the top of my blog for too long, so I'm posting a couple of snapshots that I just took from the kitchen window. Nothing spectacular, but better than venting.

I was feeling just dandy last Saturday morning while we awaited the airport shuttle to pick us up to start a five-day mini vacation to a somewhat tropical island in southern Japan, so I was more than a little dismayed when after hauling the luggage down to the van and settling into my seat that I suddenly realized that my cold – one that plagued me for a month but had, I thought, been over for the last week – had returned with the almost audible thud of a proverbial ton of bricks hitting me. I suddenly felt miserable, and [...]

I like to post right away when there's a new release of Adobe Lightroom, but alas, I've been on vacation for the last few days, and I was at the car-rental return at the Amami Ooshima Island airport when Lightroom 2.0 beta was released earlier this afternoon.

The 2.0 beta has a lot of exciting new features you can read about elsewhere (links below), but the ones I'm most excited about are localized corrections (you can "paint" exposure, saturation, tint, etc.) and multi-monitor / multi-window support. Now you know why I finally succumbed and added a second monitor a few [...]